Greek banks closed tomorrow - possibly for a week, stock market closed too.

44m ago
11:08
Austria: Greece would have to ASK to leave
 
Austria�s finance minister, Hans J�rg Schelling, has flagged up that Greece would have to ask to leave the eurozone, and get the permission of the rest of Europe:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/jun/28/greek-crisis-ecb-emergency-liquidity-referendum-bailout-live

The guardian's issued a correction - he was talking about leaving the EU, not the EZ. (And the Greeks don't want to leave either, but they're probably not going to have any choice about leaving the currency).

. Its called a bail out. We never should have. We should have cut them out there and then. They're not held hostage. Nonsense. They can leave whenever they want. But they don't because of their greedy nature

It is, indeed, called a bail-out, but is that what it actually has been? If you take a mortgage on your house are you taking a bail-out, because that seems to be the equivalent to what has happened (up to now, it's about to change).  The bail-out has involved lending money at interest from which, iirc, the ECB has so far made a profit of about four billion euros. In my lexicon a bail-out happens if someone gives you money for nothing to get you out of a hole, banks making loans at interest is not a bailout.

When you say "we never should have" you don't understand what the alternative was.  The European banks loaned money to Greece because they could get a good rate of return on it (risk level was higher than for some other places). When the risk turned out to be all too real, the banks asked the taxpayers to buy the loans from them for more than they were worth, and the voters of Europe - via their democratic leaders - agreed to do this. Why? Well, because the entire European banking system would have collapsed if they didn't. So when the Troika protest about being "blackmailed" by Greece, remember that they didn't make murmur of protest when Deutsche Bank and its colleagues were the blackmailers.

As I said, you haven't made any personal contribution to Greece yet, but that is about to change when it drops out of the euro.

Quote from: Titus Livius on June 28, 2015, 03:01

4 - people living in greece, portugal, etc ... should just plan to migrate elsewhere as soon as possible, the world is so big, plenty of better places both in the West and the East ... the EU can scr-ew us only as long as we live there, just leave for greener pastures and don't look back.

... true - so called free world is now outside the borders of EU and USA...

Many of the people who can leave Greece and get work elsewhere have gone. The trouble is that this means the young, skilled, well-educated are leaving - doctors, nurses, IT specialists, probably even down to bricklayers.  Left behind are the old, the unskilled and the unemployable. Who is going to pay for their upkeep? And what sort of country will you rebuild on these foundations?

FYI, Portugal's national debt is 130% vs Greece 179% GDP. Portugal might still have a chance to avoid the a "Greek crisis", if the Portuguese people will elect and keep in power fiscally responsible politicians,  instead of populist gamblers like Tsipras.

I wouldn't be very reassured by that if I were Portuguese. In 2008, when it was discovered that Greece needed to adopt "responsible austerity" to repair its economy, the Greek debt to GDP percentage was 129.9 - a whisker less than the current rate you quote for Portugal. It has only risen to 180% because responsibly following the EU prescription has shrunk the economy by 30%. If you divide 130 by 0.7 (the percentage of the economy that hasn't disappeared) you get 186, which shows that destroying a third of the economy and leaving more than 50% of young people without jobs over a seven year period has succeeded in cutting the debt load in cash terms by 3%. And it's clearly going to be a lot harder to squeeze another 3% out of the country over the next few years because there is so much less of the economy left to squeeze.

A recent report showed that Greece was hit by a cyclical slowdown in the shipping industry after the global crash of 2008, with freight rates being squeezed. Shipping delivers something like a fifth of the country's gdp, so this was a major blow. The normal response to a cyclical decline in a major part of the economy would be to boost spending - as the UK did - until there is a recovery. Instead, the Troika chose that moment to impose austerity. The consequences of this were not impossible to see, the Indian representative on the IMF board warned that the policies they were embarking on could lead to a recessionary spiral resulting in a full-blown depresssion - which is what has happened.

A lot is made of the spendthift Greeks who want to live the high life by borrowing other people's money, and that they should learn to live in austerity, like the Germans do. But according to a top economist writing in The Guardian today the Germans don't go for austerity at all. Their economy is based on a high level of spending to develop the infrastructure - precisely opposite to the policies they say will save Greece - see the third assessment in this article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/27/greek-bailout-extension-refused-panel-leading-economists-give-their-verdict

A lot is made of the rectitude of the Institutions, and how the Greeks should learn from them and abandon their evil ways. But it seems to be widely accepted that the ECB knew that Greece was massaging the figures but still let them in because the political project desired Greek entry and, anyway, the Germans and French had broken the rules too, so why shouldn't Greece?  They even elevated the chief Greek figure fiddler, Lucas Papademos, to the number-2 post in the ECB as a reward for his good work. If it's imagined that this was just because they didn't know of his fiddling, it's worth remembering that after the crisis erupted in 2010 - with the fiddle fully exposed - Papademos was made Prime Minister of Greece, with the Troika's enthusiastic support.

It's also worth thinking about how much the "feckless spendthrift Greeks" problem owes to the level of interest rates. If the Greeks were blessed with the same interest rates as the Germans (who you actually have to pay to get them to accept your cash) then, clearly, servicing debt would not be a problem. But when the markets want 20% or 30% return for lending then servicing the debt becomes impossible. In the 1990s, UK mortgage rates went above 16% (courtesy of the EU, as it happens), today they are maybe 6%. The difference in repayments on a 140,000 mortgage going from 6% to 16% is about �1,000 a month. How many people could cope with that sort of increase in their monthly mortgage payments without turning into "feckless spendthrifts, living high on the hog at other people's expense" who moaned about not wanting to repay all that interest on what they borrowed?

Of course, this doesn't exonerate Greece for its tax evasion, corruption and cronyism. I don't know how they will solve those problems when they seem to be pretty much built into the system. I suspect tax rates are set artificially high to make allowance for the expected degree of fiddling - so anybody paying taxes in full is actually getting over-taxed and in the case of businesses is probably becoming completely uncompetitive.

Hopefully, you will see that the situation is far more nuanced than the tabloid papers like to make out. The stuff I see a lot of people writing - and apparently believing - really is just a parody of the actual situation.

I think Dijsselbloem is about to speak ec.europa.eu/avservices/ebs/live.cfm?page=1

It will be historic.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 27, 2015, 07:29

Joining the euro is the worst thing that has happened to Greece for a long time, maybe even since the end of the civil war.

Why did Greece even joined? even better question is... why they don't like euro now, but 8 years ago it was all good about euro?

Actually, they do like the euro and they don't want to lose it. They are afraid that losing it will push them back into third-world status.  But at the same time, their economic base isn't strong enough to live with it. It's a bit like an abusive marriage with both parties afraid to call it quits.

I honestly can't tell you why they joined. I'm sure there was a fair amount of pride involved, hopes of being dragged up to north European standards on the back of the currency, a belief in the European ideal. For all I know, the politicians in charge thought they would make another fat brown envelope out of the deal.  But what really drove it, I've no idea - I'm not Greek, let alone a member of the Greek political families that decide this stuff.

....They could have established this as an easy and reliable income stream many years ago.

But you need to remember who was running the place for almost all those year - it was the very people the Troika wish were running it now. The bunch who "lost" the Lagarde List of Greeks with big Swiss accounts, and then prosecuted and persecuted a journalist for daring to publish it after it was leaked to him. Syriza will probably turn out no better - I'm no fan of the hard left - but it's unfair to throw the sins of their opponents in their faces.

Quote from: heywoody on June 27, 2015, 08:31

Paul is absolutely correct.  The point here is not so much about the dire situation of the Greek people though.  The point is that the EU, which is supposed to have social justice as a core principle, is applying the jackboot to the necks of the Greeks in order to serve the interests of very wealthy people.

so just keep pumping money into a bottomless pit and let Greece run amok with our money? If Greece defaults no one gets rich. A coroner makes money on someone's death. Its just business.

Hey, I never said that. What I said was there there are different kinds of poverty, one is the sort of stable daily grind of living a tough life - which you just get on with - the other comes from thinking you've climbed the ladder to prosperity and suddenly having the ladder kicked out from under you.

Nobody knows what the best solution is to Greece. Maybe it's the long, slow grind of submitting to austerity inside a currency that you never should have been in, maybe it's better to get out of the currency and try to make do without anything from abroad. The tragedy is what happens to ordinary people who thought they had been elevated from the subsistence life and suddenly find that events beyond their control make life worse than they could imagine. People really are committing suicide because they have lost hope. It's not a financial game, it's real life. The educated kids who can get away are fleeing to the north to make a living, taking their skills with them (only four other people were liviing on my lane - two ancient ladies and two guys in their 30s, one of them was overjoyed because he got a job in Norway, so there are just three now, living in six old houses). One can only wonder how a "lazy Greek" would be able to keep up with the workload for an employee in Norway!!

Anyway, the argument isn't about "throwing more money" at Greece, it's about how to make the Greek economy grow so it can repay its debts.  It was 120% of GDP in hock at the start of this, and after the pre-Syriza sucesses of austerity it ended up 180% of GDP in hock. How? Simply because the debt shrank very marginally while the economy collapsed at about the same rate and on the same scale as America in the Great Depression. Even the IMF admits that the whole programme it was behind was disastrously wrong - but it wants more of the same because it can't think of any alternative.

In the absence of a plan for growth, squeezing more money out of Greece will just lead to further economic contraction and make the debt more unpayable. Until, eventually, the inevitable default happens.

It's also worth noting that the Greek primary surplus last year, if adjusted for cyclical factors, was not the 1% or 0% headline figure, but 5 or 6%, according to an OECD report last week, making Greece already by far the most profitable economy in the EU on that measure. I guess the new proposals would push the adjusted surplus up around 10%, but at a huge cost in poverty.

It's a terrible situation and as I'm just about to retire there I don't relish any of the possible outcomes. If Greeks "reject austerity" they will get a big dose of additional austerity from dropping out of the euro-zone and maybe eventually the EU itself, if they bow to the creditors then there is likely to be a decade more of economic contraction.
Joining the euro is the worst thing that has happened to Greece for a long time, maybe even since the end of the civil war.

I talking about the outrage seen when DPC was launched, name it as you want.
Why don't we see a similar outrage when we get a spit in the eye with these $0.19 commissions?

If you think the outrage over DPC was all about the commissions you completely missed the point.

Your objections to the istock tracking, reporting delay, lack of transparency and lack of opt-out all have merit - but the secretive and tricky way DPC was imposed on suppliers and the sales model it created was far worse. I'm glad to see that in the Fotolia/Adobe era they seem to be sidelining DPC.

PS: I'm no great fan of iStock, despite having almost 5,000 files there I haven't bothered to upload to them since February.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on June 23, 2015, 23:24

Quote from: Zero Talent on June 23, 2015, 18:40

Why there is no IS boycott movement since they pay much less than DPC?

Sent from my SM-N910T using Tapatalk

DPC pays much more than 60c per sale? I find that hard to believe.

not always, but definitely more than $0.19 or the industry's disgrace!

Does it "sometimes" pay more than the iStock average?

Ahh, thanks. Wonderful to think one can get 19c from being with the mighty Getty! I do hope it doesn't get refunded later. I haven't written down what the previous months totals used to be so I can't tell if they are going into anywhere prior to May.