THE GREAT BIG FAT GREEK THREAD

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

20 minutes ago, inbruges said:

I was in Greece a few months ago, admittedly it Was Kefalonia where things are supposed to be far better. But you can still sense the desperation and hardship. It took the gloss off the holiday and I won;t be returning for a while, and I used to love so much about Greece, it has lost it's soul at the moment.

There is a famous quote from someone when Greece was on the verge of leaving the EU and it was really kicking off, the Greek government came out of a meeting with the EU shocked and went very quite, I loved to have known what was said. I am not an anarchist, but Banks really need a good sorting out, they have destroyed lives

I note the article now refers to the outstanding loans. I don't recall seeing that. Maybe it was retrospectively edited or maybe I missed it.

Anyway, the whole thing looks like colossal can kicking to me. They are now requesting a 10 year hiatus before payback starts, and that it may well run to 2060, with them running a primary surplus of 2.2% until then.

I guess the 15-24 40% unemployment rate will come down via kids bailing out of the country en masse.

 

 

 

 

[Saving For a Space Ship]

 Greece was never bailed out – it remains locked in an EU debtor's prison

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/26/greece-was-never-bailed-out---it-remains-a-debtors-prison-and-the-eu-still-holds-the-keys

Quote

To get a feel for the devastation that ensued, imagine what would have happened in the UK if RBS, Lloyds and the other City banks had been rescued without the help of the Bank of England and solely via foreign loans to the exchequer. All granted on the condition that UK wages would be reduced by 40%, pensions by 45%, the minimum wage by 30%, NHS spending by 32%. The UK would now be the wasteland of Europe, just as Greece is today.

But did this nightmare not end last week? Not in the slightest. Technically speaking, the Greek bailouts had two components. The first entailed the EU and the IMF granting the Greek government some financial facility by which to pretend to be repaying its debts. Then there was the harsh austerity taking the form of ridiculously high tax rates and savage cuts in pensions, wages, public health and education.

Last week, the third bailout package did end, just as the second had ended in 2015 and the first in 2012. We now have a fourth such package that differs from the past three in two unimportant ways. Instead of new loans, payments of €96.6bn that were due to begin in 2023 will be deferred until after 2032, when the monies must be repaid with interest on top of other large repayments previously scheduled. And, second, instead of calling it a fourth bailout, the EU has named it, triumphantly, the “end of the bailout”.

Ridiculously high VAT and small business tax rates will, of course, continue, as will fresh pension cuts and new punitive income tax rates for the poorest that have been scheduled for 2019.

The Greek government has also committed to maintaining a long-term budget surplus target, not counting debt repayments (3.5% of national income until 2021, and 2.2% during 2022-2060) that demands permanent austerity, a target that the IMF itself gives less than 6% probability of ever being attained by any eurozone country.

In summary, after having bailed out French and German banks at the expense of Europe’s poorest citizens, and after having turned Greece into a debtor’s prison, last week Greece’s creditors decided to declare victory.

Having put Greece into a coma, they made it permanent and declared it “stability”: they pushed our people off a cliff and celebrated their bounce off the hard rock of a great depression as proof of “recovery”. To quote Tacitus, they made a desert and called it peace.

 

[simvastatin]

OK, let me be contraire and post something positive

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-27/the-world-s-top-market-by-far-rebuilds-from-crisis-taking-stock-k3gywx5j

While Europe’s equity benchmark is set to record its best annual gain since 2009, it’s been left in the dust by the top stock market worldwide: Greece. The country’s shares have climbed 45% this year, rising from a low base after a decade of crises. As Greek stocks get out of the doldrums, fund managers may start looking at the market again.

You have to go back to the time before the euro replaced the drachma to find higher returns in the Greek equity market, and there are reasons to be optimistic about the coming year, particularly if the economy continues to improve. Momentum for Greece accelerated after the summer election, according to George Lagarias, chief economist at Mazars Financial Planning, as the new government showed its willingness to implement a package of tax cuts and pro-business policies. That has reduced some of the discount that Greek risk assets were trading at, he says.

“Greece remains one sweet treat for us,” says Emiel Van Den Heiligenberg, head of asset allocation at Legal & General Investment Management. The portfolio manager says despite a 180% government-debt-to-GDP ratio, there’s a lot of positive data coming from the Greek economy. In particular, the nation’s manufacturing PMI is just about the only one in Europe above 50, pointing to economic growth. It’s been resilient to the global downturn, driven by local factors, most notably the sentiment improvement around the new government, he says. Consumer confidence kept improving through the year, hitting its highest level in almost two decades.