Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister 328
eldavojohn writes A turnover in the Greek government resulted from recent snap elections placing SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) in power — just shy of an outright majority by two seats. Atheist, and youngest Prime Minister in Greek history since 1865, Alexis Tsipras has been appointed the new prime minister and begun taking immediate drastic steps against the recent austerity laws put in place by prior administrations. One such step has been to appoint Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis to position of Finance Minister of Greece. For the past three years Varoufakis has been working at Steam to analyze and improve the Steam Market but now has the opportunity to improve one of the most troubled economies in the world.
Honestly... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know how to feel about this one...
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Re: Honestly... (Score:2, Informative)
That's because game economies are like real economies in many ways and they know that economies collapse when you have austerity...when too little new money is created.
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That's because game economies are like real economies in many ways and they know that economies collapse when you have too much debt...when too little debt is paid back.
FTFY.
Re: Honestly... (Score:5, Insightful)
This certainly explains the observed tendency of economies to collapse randomly no matter how they're run.
However, unlike in game economies, decisions in real economies affect people in addition to economy. Even if austerity actually was a cure to euro's problems, it cannot continue without destroying EU itself. People aren't going to tolerate endless misery just to boost some number, no matter how necessary politicians (who don't share the misery) deem it.
Either EU gets euro to work without austerity, or it has to abandon it. Demanding sacrifices from the common people who's reward is having less say in their own local affairs is quickly discrediting the entire union.
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Either EU gets euro to work without austerity, or it has to abandon it. Demanding sacrifices from the common people who's reward is having less say in their own local affairs is quickly discrediting the entire union.
That was a design bug known from the very beginning. Or, if you're a banker, a design feature. The less prosperous EU nations were interested in having other, more prosperous countries help finance their social programs' largesse. Of course those holding the purse strings saw an opportunity there.
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What Europe calls austerity, everyone else calls living within one's means. Which, in the long term, is non-optional.
Re: Honestly... (Score:5, Interesting)
What Europe calls austerity, everyone else calls living within one's means. Which, in the long term, is non-optional.
Quite apart from the politics and economics, this is a really complex moral issue.
On the one hand, the Greek people repeatedly elected governments that failed to collect taxes or eliminate corruption, spent money that they didn't have and borrowed money that they couldn't afford to repay. On that assessment, the Greeks deserve every bit of misery they've endured since their creditors decided to stop pouring good money after bad. But the trouble with that view is that a different bunch of Greeks are having to pay the bills: an entire generation is growing up with a broken economy because their parents voted for jam today.
It's the same with the creditors. In pursuit of political gain and a quick buck, banks and other eurozone governments supported successive corrupt Greek governments in their act of intergenerational theft. They deserve to lose their shirts as the Greeks default just as surely as a payday lender that fails to assess the affordability of its loans deserves to go bust. The problem is that the bill ultimately gets picked up by innocent bystanders - mostly German taxpayers. True, those same German taxpayers voted for their inept government that failed to regulate their banks' exposure to Greece, but that was hardly a major electoral issue at the time.
So Greek voters and Greek governments connived with European bankers to profit from the German population and younger Greeks. I have no sympathy with any of them. A plague on all their houses!
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EU is a fail by allowing Greece to join in the first place. Greece would have been far worse off today without joining the EU, and the EU would have been better off.
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I'm hoping to pick up an Acropolis during the next holiday or summer sale.
Badges (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Badges (Score:5, Funny)
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Hat Act 1732 (Score:5, Interesting)
And hats, hats, as far as the eye can see!
There'd be precedent for that in the European Union. England had a law [wikipedia.org] in effect from 1571 through 1597 to make failure to wear a British-made wool cap in public a crime.
All we have to do (Score:2, Funny)
...is farm more gold. That'll solve all of our economic woes!
Brave Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Finance Minister of Greece ranks pretty high on my list of "you could pay me enough, but it would be A LOT" jobs.
Re:Brave Man (Score:4, Informative)
Preferably in a foreign currency, right?
FYI, there is no "national currency" in Greece, anything is paid in Euro.
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Valve's time (Score:5, Funny)
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Not at all. They'll move to a rapid release schedule. There will be discrete episodes.
Episode 1 will be the removal of previous measures.
Episode 2 will be an announcement that the end of all problems is coming soon.
Then they'll spend 6 years promising episode 3 is coming soon.
Soon: Greece abandons the Euro (Score:3, Funny)
and transitions to a diversified, hat-based economy.
This doesn't sound... sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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You know ... looking around what has happened in the last few decades ... I think being a trained economist makes you eminently unqualified to run an economy.
Economics is as much ideology as it is "science" -- what you think will happen depends on what you believe happens. Economics is not some intrinsic natural law.
It seems like trained economists are just as likely to fuck up an economy as would be trained monkeys -- because at the end of the day you have shockingly little control over things, and probab
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Not claiming I have the answers ... but I'm flat out saying the economists who tell us WTF the economy is doing and why are so completely full of shit as to be laughable.
Economics isn't a science, it's fucking ideology.
The idiotic policies of Alan Greenspan almost directly led to the housing bubble ... and even he admits his notion of "free money" was idiotic and wrong.
Economics is NOT a fucking science and never has been, it's intrinsically linked to politics and ideology.
People who claim it is some kind o
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Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit, it sure isn't objective science, it's models, based on dubious assumptions which aren't reflective of anything other than the beliefs of the person who made them, and then using mathematics of dubious quality to "prove" what your ideology tells you.
Are you an asshole or a douchebag?
I'm saying that when people say "if you cut taxes it will stimulate the economy", that is a purely ideological position, not grounded in objective fact. And economics serves no purpose if it isn't down to implementing policy, which is inherently idological.
No, I'm saying physics still boils down to actual objective reality, and in no fucking way shape or form does economics do that, and never has.
Frankly, you're an asshole who thinks too highly of his own opinion.
So far you've failed to offer anything intelligent, just the cowardly ad hominem attacks of a worthless moron with nothing new to add.
So, I'll tell you what, here's a piece by someone who has a fucking Nobel prize in "economic science". [theguardian.com]
One problem with economics is that it is necessarily focused on policy, rather than discovery of fundamentals. Nobody really cares much about economic data except as a guide to policy: economic phenomena do not have the same intrinsic fascination for us as the internal resonances of the atom or the functioning of the vesicles and other organelles of a living cell. We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics, more practical than spiritual.
There is no Nobel prize for engineering, though there should be. True, the chemistry prize this year looks a bit like an engineering prize, because it was given to three researchers - Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel - "for the development of multiscale models of complex chemical systems" that underlie the computer programs that make nuclear magnetic resonance hardware work. But the Nobel Foundation is forced to look at much more such practical, applied material when it considers the economics prize.
The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention. The Nobel prize is designed to reward those who do not play tricks for attention, and who, in their sincere pursuit of the truth, might otherwise be slighted.
Why is it called a prize in "economic sciences", rather than just "economics"? The other prizes are not awarded in the "chemical sciences" or the "physical sciences."
Fields of endeavour that use "science" in their titles tend to be those that get masses of people emotionally involved and in which crackpots seem to have some purchase on public opinion. These fields have "science" in their names to distinguish them from their disreputable cousins.
So, seriously, fuck off and grow up.
Economics is descriptive how what complex systems involving humans do. But is is NOT measuring some innate natural properties of how that actually works.
As soon as economics goes from measuring and describing, and steps into applying policy .... it utterly ceases to be a science.
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As soon as economics goes from measuring and describing, and steps into applying policy .... it utterly ceases to be a science.
Exactly. This is why Paul Krugman is a jerk, not an economist. When he said in the interview he envisioned economics as ideal for him, because it made him feel he could control the future, like in Asimov's "Foundation" books.
why is this rated a troll? (Score:2)
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The public has been promised as much and a grexit to Drachmes will immediately drop Greece into a 3rd world country (Greece depends fully on import).
So, EU will grudge and give some as EU's internal bank system is a shithole of interloans.
France, Italy and Spain will also want some after that.
Of course, in northern countries things start to get rumbling as well; all savings, retireme
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Even this is debatable..
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Case in point, the paper that convinced everyone austerity was the answer was found to have a math error that flipped the results. Everyone knows it but austerity marches on because the top economists say what their masters want them to say.
Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet some economists, like Krugman or Greenspan, are quite prescient with their predictions, and were/are right more often than they were/are wrong about what will happen in the future. It makes more sense to pay attention to someone who has a good track record...Krugman didn't win a Nobel prize because he was lucky or didn't know what the hell he was talking about...
Economists are like poker players. Yes, there's a lot of luck involved and half the time no one knows what they are anyone else are doing, but it IS possible to be a good economist.
Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:4)
You realize Krugman and Greenspan have more or less opposite views?
Have you been paying attention to recent Nobel prizes? They (peace and econ anyhow) into political popularity contests.
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Krugman is probably the perfect example of how most economists are actually just ideologues pretending to be scientists. His pieces for the NYT often read like the rants on DailyKos.
His predictions as to the success or failure of a plan are almost entirely based on who is currently in power (and he has a terrible track record on real world predictions of global financial events from the housing bubble to the state of the EU) and his post analysis almost always centers around the same points (increased gove
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Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going to judge based on what his last job was, if he's actually technically qualified to do this one.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. Not to mention that it sort of got them there to begin with. And the people likely elected these guys because they want their benefits back, somehow. Sadly democracy does not always make for good economic policy.
It would be interesting if there was some clever model that could get them out of this mes.
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With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. .
Who in their right mind would lend to the Greeks? The way it is looking now, the German taxpayers will be paying for it . . . and they are not enthusiastically pleased about it, to say the least.
Having Greece and Germany share a common currency was a shit-brained idea. In one hour, German workers shove off a couple of Porsches and Mercedes of their production line. In one hour, Greek workers roll a few dolmades and stuff a few gigantes in a can.
And yes, I worked with some guys from Greece on a European
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If you'd not question Valve hiring the former Finance Minister of Greece to manage the economy of their market, why would you question the reverse?
The guy's an economist. That's what you want. Meritocracy and all that. And Valve are hardly suffering for his presence in their organisation from what I see, even though they haven't put out their blockbuster game promised nearly 10 years ago.
They're obviously doing SOMETHING right, attracting millions of people and tens of millions of item sales every day.
Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:5, Interesting)
borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
I don't think you understand macroeconomics. There is a too limited money supply that is significantly worsening a recession/derpession. Greece gave up one of its primary rights as a sovereign -- issuing its own currency -- and so lacks one of the most powerful policy tools for intervention in its own economy. If it wasn't part of the euro, it wouldn't have to borrow from anyone but itself. Even the US mainly borrows from itself: the majority of its debt is not held by foreigners but is simply a number registered between treasury and federal reserve, which is an accounting fiction akin to debt between husband and wife. There are primarily political reasons some of the US debt is held by others, but it's not a basic requirement of its monetary system. The typical argument against government spending is inflation, but that doesn't happen if the spending is targeted as to decrease unemployment and thus increase aggregate demand -- which is exactly what's needed in a recession. The devil is in exactly how the spending should be carried out (things like a job guarantee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... [wikipedia.org] come to mind) and should not be carried out (Bernanke's quantitative easing).
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I do understand the problem of a limited money supply, but I don't think they're seriously considering leaving the euro, so talking about an independent monetary policy is pointless. They need to bring in more money, and while they maintain the euro, they either need to borrow or somehow change monetary policy related to the euro to suit them. Borrowing still seems more likely than a change in Eurozone monetary policy.
Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score:5, Interesting)
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.
Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.
It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi. [theatlantic.com]
One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.
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Generating a different payment plan might be useful, although as you pointed out, nowhere near enough.
Unless they intend to get forgiveness... or default. I am not sure that Greece is "too big to fail" where they can do that.
Greece needs long term thinking. Austerity might well be a knee-jerk reaction, so hopefully they can reasonably do what you suggest, like changing certain parameters and becoming more efficient at collecting taxes. On the other hand, collecting taxes is not always so straightforward
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I have a question for you – what do you see as the difference between extending payments and defaulting / writing down on the debt?
IIRC, the last round of "extending payments" effectively reduced the net present value of the debt by 20%. At a certain point, the difference between restructuring and defaulting comes down to semantics.
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That consideration is a factor, but governments tend to be long lasting entities, so they could certainly eventually pay off the debt, if they shrunk or even deferred payments for awhile. Something is usually better than nothing for a vendor, as long as the cost of administering the debt is less than what they bring in.
The best thing for Greece to do financially is to restore solvency. Austerity may not be the best solution, but it is certainly on the right track. Defaults or borrow and spend can work, b
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It appears that Greece is pretty much screwed. The people aren't willing to sacrifice to pay back the debt. I'm pretty sure the bankers have already given all the ground they're willing to give. At this point it looks hopeless. You've got an opportunist politician now running things who has won by telling people what they want to hear. I wonder what's going to happen when it becomes obvious he can't deliver?
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However, I would tend to agree with you that a clean bankruptcy is better than a messy partial default. Expect that there is no real mechanism to Greece to default. If I understand correctly, it would be easier for Greece to exit the EU, convert to the Drachma, and devalue the currency.
Except that all those debts are denominated in Euro, so exiting and devaluing makes things worse. So they need to exit and default. This means that they've lost the advantages of being in the common trade area, their currency will be worth very little (which might boost tourism to a point) but no-one will lend them money so they will either inflate at a very high rate or be forced to do their own austerity and either way it does not improve their prospects.
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It is. EU is not a nation, it's a collection of nations, and "European identity" is weak at best. Anti-EU movements are already growing, and won't have any trouble taking power if it starts to look like EU is a threat to the nations people actually identity with.
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About two years ago, I read that the main industry of the Greek oligarchs is "tax evasion". I doubt that has changed.
In any case, it will be good to have a fresh set of eyes on the issue.
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Leftist borrowing and spending? As opposed to the Right's strategy, which is to borrow much more and give it to your rich business partners?
I don't know how folks like you can live in the real world and parrot these lines over and over again with nothing to show for it. When the left "borrows and spends", the "spending" side all goes to rich business partners. Every single time.
Why do you think that the "recovery" in the US has gone mostly to the top 10%? What do you think about Solyndra? Geeze. Get out of the partisan gutter and join us here in the real world.
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Don't get me wrong. Borrowing and spending is a totally legitimate way of dealing with the issue... if you can do it without doing long term damage to your economy with it.
Economics comes down to hard and fast numbers for some things, but it is just as much based on the mood of the people and how and where they spend their money. If you can make them more optimistic, you can pull out of it, if your fundamentals are not completely devastated.
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Borrowing and spending only makes sense if the borrowing leads to enough additional income in the future to justify paying off the interest on the loan. That generally means infrastructure spending, for infrastructure that is actually needed to create real growth.
Borrowing for anything else just makes you poorer in the long term.
Look for a Presidents Day sale! (Score:2)
Yanis Varoufakis (Score:5, Informative)
He basically wants Eurozone banks to have a single rescue fund, for the ECB to issue bonds, and the EIB to invest into the periphery economies to get out of the crisis.
There's just one problem. Even if they make sense none of those things can be done by Greece alone. I hope he has a Plan B.
You can see him explain his views on the current economic crisis in this video [youtube.com].
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The problem is that rewriting your debt repayment obligations without the consent of the debt holders is called "default", and the results can be fairly drastic.
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That's why a large part of his job is going to be negotiating with the EU.
He's absolutely right too. When all those little countries gave up their own currencies, they also gave up control of their own monetary policy. That means it has to be run from the EU, or its not being run at all. Its like everyone jumping on a big ship with nobody at the rudder, trusting in its own sheer size to keep everyone safe. That might not be a problem while everything's going great, but if there are reefs or an iceberg ahea
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If you listen to his talks what he says is that a lot of countries cooked their books to get into the Eurozone. He says Greece simply borrowed the same creative accounting technique Italy used to get in the Eurozone so by the same metric Italy shouldn't have been in either. He also stated that Germany also used creative accounting by counting the gold they had in their treasury as income in order to erase the debt of their federal states.
Counter-Strike servers please (Score:2, Offtopic)
That is some unexpected news, as I was reading an interview of a French economic newspaper with this guy.
Let me chime in for a personal revendication which might be useful for the working or modest or youth classes. Counterstrike 1.x is lacking servers both in quantity and quality, a small few are nice but it is a pain to suffer 24/7 dust2, zombie mods (wtf?) and too many gun game servers. We should organize to provide community servers with good map rotations, good map voting (but servers without voting as
Out of the frying pan, into the fire (Score:2)
Assuming Alexis Tsipras is unsatisfied with his old job, maybe he's leaving just to blow off steam. But I don't know how much good that will do him: the job of Finance Minister of Greece is bound to be a pressure cooker. I just hope the problems there don't boil over.
Valve sale on Greece debt! 75% off! (Score:2)
Radical Left allowed to run a country... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Radical Left allowed to run a country... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a better link to an article from The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs... [economist.com]
AS one country after another on the periphery of the euro zone had to swallow painful reforms and fiscal austerity as the price for their bail-outs between 2010 and 2013, the surprise was that by and large they accepted the medicine without a large-scale populist revolt. But Sunday’s result in the Greek election marks a turning-point because Syriza, the radical-left party that has prevailed at the polls, campaigned on casting aside austerity, backtracking on the reforms and renegotiating the vast debt that Greece owes its European creditors. These policies are unacceptable to the euro-zone countries, especially Germany, that have lent Greece so much money. The outcome of the election could also have wider implications. Why does the Greek result matter?
A clash is impending because the Greeks see their recent history in a very different light from that of the Germans and other Europeans who have bailed them out. From the perspective of Northern creditor nations, Greece was the architect of its own misfortune by mismanaging its public finances on a staggering scale. It has been lent an astonishing amount of money in not just one but two bail-outs, amounting to €246 billion ($275 billion), worth more than the country’s entire economic output. From a Greek perspective, however, the country has suffered a calamitous decline in GDP, which at its low in late 2013 was 27% down on its pre-crisis peak. Harsh spending cuts and tax rises have been imposed again and again as conditions for further economic support. Greeks feel that they have lost control of their country, which is now instead being directed by the hated troika: the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank.
Syriza won on Sunday because Alexis Tsipras, the party's leader, offered a message of hope to a country still in despair, even though the economy is now recovering. But the difficulty with his plan for Greece is that it requires other Europeans to finance it—or to countenance a reversal of reforms they regard as vital for Greece to cope with euro-zone membership. If Mr Tsipras makes good on promises of higher spending and lower taxes then Greece will fail to meet its objective of running a big primary budget surplus (ie, before interest payments), which would make it far harder to get its debt down from 175% of GDP. And if he reverses reforms such as the ones that have brought down wages, then Greece will head back towards the uncompetitive economic mess that, along with budgetary mismanagement, got it into trouble in the first place.
In the negotiations that will now occur between Mr Tsipras and Greece’s creditors, Germany will give little ground. Angela Merkel, too, must pay attention to domestic opinion, which would be hostile to any concessions. The German chancellor also has to reckon with the wider impact of any deal that appeared to reward Syriza in emboldening populist revolts in other countries in the euro area, notably in Spain. For any country to leave the euro will be destabilising because it would break the supposed irrevocability of membership. But if Mr Tsipras were to get his way then the euro area would become a club where borrowers rather than lenders called the shots, which would be unsustainable. That is why Mr Tsipras will, before long, face a difficult choice between backing down on his demands—or presiding over a ruinous Greek exit.
Re:Radical Left allowed to run a country... (Score:4, Interesting)
That article hits the nail in the head. For Europe, this is not about Greece: Their economy is small, and by itself, if they sank nothing would matter. It's what it says to Spain, a country with a general election coming pretty soon, and who has its own new, populist left wing party that runs against corruption and austerity.
The Eurozone can handle anything that happens to Greece. But if Spain decides to ignore the troika, beware.
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Though unlikely to change your opinion, Krugman has an interesting piece on how they're not so radical after all, but pretty much following textbook macro [nytimes.com]. Don't like Krugman? Well, he predicted the economic quagmire that we're in now. Bill Gross was so off he got kicked out of his own firm.
If you're reactionary, everything pretty much looks like radicalism,
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And with Eastasia [wikipedia.org]...
What sort of "provcateurs" can explain the quadrupling [wikipedia.org] of murder rate there since 1998? And the supermarket shelves, which aren't just underwhelming, but outright empty?
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Well, if it has been a problem for 500 years, please quadrupling of the homicide rate in the country since 1998 [fusion.net]. And the 23-fold increase in kidnappings over the same period [wikipedia.org]... Are you going to blame the CIA for it?
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Go ahead. Be sure to cite facts, though. With Wikileaks and Snowden out there, you ought to have plenty to work with. Take your time.
Begs the question, does not it?..
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Thank you for admitting, you don't have any.
They aren't there (as far as I know) — which ought to have told you something. Had there been anything, you would've seen it Guardian and NY Times 20 times already...
No, it is not sufficient.
By announcing your own not believing in facts, you really left me nothing to poke holes
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Chile's Pinochet, upon stepping down (show me one Left-dictator to have done that!), has left his country as the top Latin American economy. And their homicide-rate today is 3.7 per 100K people — compare that to Venezuela's 67 [fusion.net]!
By not voting for the assholes — and by persecuting them wherever they appear with the same v
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Chile's Pinochet, upon stepping down (show me one Left-dictator to have done that!), has left his country as the top Latin American economy.
Really? Then why is this organge line [wikipedia.org] indicating the average of Latin America above the blue line indicating Chile between 1970 and 1991? There is also a different story to tell. [infoshop.org]
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Because life sucked in the country, and the Marxist Allende (elected in 1970) proceeded to further destroy the economy until stopped by Pinochet in 1973. A series of reforms — commonly known today as "Miracle of Chile" [wikipedia.org] — were necessary. The upswing in the blue line, that outperforms the orange line so convincingly today started in 1984 — with a mi
Well... (Score:2)
I for one welcome our new virtual-currency overlords.
Geddit? Because Valve made Half-life 2, and...
Oh, forget it.
Why the atheist mention? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's important news that matters for nerds...because real nerds don't like seeing delusional whack jobs (i.e. Christians) in positions of power fighting science and progress. Having an Atheist is historic like having a historically persecuted minority in a position of power.
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Because its interesting? The Prime Minister is Atheist as well, and refused to take a ceremonial diety-based oath. This is apparently a first in Greece since the war ended (if not ever).
I'm Christian myself, but I'm strongly for religious freedom, and I find it interesting. In an ideal world this wouldn't be big news, but it is to Greeks, so it is. That's what progress looks like.
taxes, civil servants, (Score:2)
My knowledge of Greek economics doesn't go much beyond NPR, but the changes needed seem pretty straightforward:
1. Reform civil service
2. Aggressively prosecute tax fraud
3. Tax church assessts (i.e. church either make is assets poductive or sells them to someone who will)
An angry coalition leftists and iconoclasts might be pretty good at 2 of these things. Maybe all 3?
Greece's problem is lack of ecumenic freedom (Score:4, Informative)
Don't be mislead by the debt problem. If Greece had economic growth, it would not have a debt problem.
Greece rankes "mostly unfree" [heritage.org] on the Index of Economic Freedom:
By the way, regarding "austerity", Greece's public expenditures equal 58.5 percent of domestic output. That does not sound very austere to me.
Re:Greece's problem is lack of ecumenic freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Japan has more public debt than Greece [wikipedia.org]. But its government only spends about 35% of its GDP [oecd-ilibrary.org].
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Japan can also print its own money, which gives it the ability (at least in theory) to wipe out all public debt with the stroke of a pen. There are consequences to that action, but when your debt is counted in your own currency, you can largely ignore the public debt, as long as inflation is kept in check. Most non-eurozone countries (including the US) do the same thing. In fact, inflation has long been used by most nations to decrease the impact of public debt, as the fixed-dollar debt can be reduced to a
Misleading title (Score:2)
Austerity (Score:2)
The patient died, but the operation was a success.
Getting Greece to be 99% self-sufficient (Score:3)
My suggestion from 2008 when Greece ran out of tear gas: https://groups.google.com/foru... [google.com] :-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure. ... :-) Instead, we have a system in the middle that produces some variety at a huge expense of human effort taken away from family and civic duties, and it is a system now with so many questions about its uncertain future (including that anyone who is young will have a dignified place in the economic scheme of things) that an entire country has just run out of tear gas. This makes no sense (except of course, that some people do benefit from this, like tear gas manufacturers, school teachers who get paid to keep kids off the streets preparing them for non-existent jobs, people who are near the top of the economic hierarchy already and feel secure, etc.). :-) But, no need to move with the internet really. Maybe somebody on the list could coordinate moving the rioters off th
"Now, does this make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off
So, ironically, we have the worst of both systems. We could have a really centralized system run efficiently with a tiny fraction of the workforce now, with a lot less variety perhaps (that is, all the old Soviet Central Planning stuff would work now that we have the internet and great software and great designs and great computers if we accept some voluntary simplicity), but with everything very cheap (essentially, just given away) and 99% of the population doing whatever they wanted with their time. Or, we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing where people just make whatever they want in an open way, with all sorts of useful and useless items. (Aspects of the two extremes may even converge, since what are the 99% of people going to do with the generic stuff but customize it?
Anyway, this suggests one target of open manufacturing could be a community of size ranging from Iceland (about 300,000 people) to Greece (about 11,000,000 people). That's certainly an interesting size range. I would think 99% closure of those economies by mass should be easily doable. Computer chips, some medicines, and maybe some other specialized components might be the major imports after the system was set up. Note that while one may not expect Greece or Iceland to "self-replicate" any time soon, the ability do do so ensures it can be self-repairing.
Anyway, it kind of comes down to how much economic security is worth to a country compared to minimum effort. Given the massive youth unemployment in Greece, and the economic fears of depending on a global economy, it would seem like maximizing productive efficiency through participating in global production would not be at the top of their priority list now that they are out of tear gas. Unfortunately, they did not invest in this research ten years ago. So, this is only theoretical at this point. It might take a very expensive crash program to bring together thousands of researchers for a year to make headway in any time that might make a difference. Still, politically, that is an out for Greece. We could all move there, recruit all the educated youths off the streets, and spend a year figuring out how to make Greece work for everybody and be 99% self-sufficient by mass.
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Election of who?
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They're already past the "make things worse" stage. That's what austerity brought.
Shit's hitting the fan and that's why the radicals are showing up
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They're already past the "make things worse" stage. That's what austerity brought.
No, austerity didn't bring it. If anything, trying to spend within your limited means will postpone making things worse. Do it long enough and things might even get better.
But borrowing and spending isn't going to make it better, even if they can find someone from whom to borrow.
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They're already past the "make things worse" stage. That's what austerity brought.
No, austerity didn't bring it.
Well, saving the banks did initiate it, but austerity made it only worse [google.es] (2011 is the year of the haircut).
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Grappa is Italian, you're thinking of Tsipouro [wikipedia.org] -- even if they're mostly the same thing.
And you're only about the 4th person that I've ever encountered besides me who will admit to liking grappa -- I know old Italians who wince at the mention of it. :-P
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Shutting down the insolvent banks only solves the bank problems. It doesn't solve the country's and, as you rightly point out, the banks should not be that tied to the country policy.
In many ways, making the banks insolvent is a death warrant to future credit and investment. Who's going to start a bank in Greece now? And who's going to bail out Greece when they can't afford healthcare any more, get invaded, etc.?
The problem is bigger than the banks, hence focusing on the banks is erroneous. What they've
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