Greek Crisis - What is the Real Reason?
Guys what do you think the real reason is behind the Greek Crisis?
I think its like this video says , the Greeks were set up!
What are your theories?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Or do we say that if it's under 5%, say, we reset it to 0%?
It's the same problem with "whose vote is more important?" kinds of questions. If you need 51% to win, and blacks are 7% of the vote, Latinos are 6% of the vote, women not of color are 28% of your vote total, and men (...) are 10% of your vote, did you win just because of the women's vote? The black vote? The Latino vote? Because you "OWE" (as one recent DUer screamed) the group that put you over the top. You damned well "OWE" them. Well, then, that means you didn't need the others. So take away any of the groups *not* owed and do you get to 51%? No.
Or in sports, we always celebrate the point that led to the 20-19 victory (or whatever). But without that first point, it would have been a 19-19 tie. The first and the last point are equally important.
So, what's *the* factor in the Greek economic debacle? People will want to look at the last little bit, the straw that broke the camel's back. When there are lots of causes.
The rich--and middle class, and poor--didn't pay their share of taxes; endemic tax evasion (not just avoidance). Low taxes. Lots of tax loopholes. So low revenue.
Early retirement, making it so people stopped producing as well as started just consuming federal budget territory.
Low productivity elsewhere in their economy. It's a small country, to be sure, but too many entrepreneurs were quoted saying they had to import things. Moreover, so many routine things are cheaper to make abroad and import. Even olive oil isn't fully controlled by Greeks--most is exported by Italians and the middlemen increases go there. Greece produces raw materials and much of the value-added is done elsewhere.
A lot of this is the legacy of history. Socialist and then strong-arm governments focus on control, not producing a modern, nimble economy, and control tends to inhibit any forces driving the economy to modernize or be nimble. Spain had the same problem. Italy just had instability.
Family structure, social trust (or lack thereof), and other social factors also tend to keep companies from growing beyond what a single smallish family can manage, both in terms of getting investment and just expanding. It's the "Chinese disease"--you only trust family, so when you run out of them you run out of senior and mid-level managers; the business is run for the family, and a family emergency can decimate the business; and after the founder's death, as the family comes to be a number of related separate families, the business splinters. That leaves large corporations for the government to organize, and a gap where the most useful ones should exist, the mid-sized companies.
The last two things play into corruption. Lots of money just vanishes from the public coffers.
So if you need to bring your economy up to speed, you need revenues, increasing productivity, social trust to produce a lot of mid-sized companies, and confidence that the money for these things won't wind up on Giannis Giannopoulos' ("John Johnson's"
bank account in Cyprus. When you borrow money, ditto. When you refinance, you need to stick to your deal. ("Social trust." And when you prove yourself to be a deceitful, duplicitous customer, you tend to get restrictions on your behavior and the demand for up-front actions on your part grows.
And all of this is entirely separate from the austerity/Keynesian debate we usually hear.
