Greek drama

[amalan11]

Is anyone affected by the drama in Greece ? It seems like they will default , I work in a currency exchange and people are frantically  getting euro. Apparently the banks over there are all closed for a week and people can only take out €60 from autotellers .

I feel sorry for Greek people I heard today that if they default they will likly go back to the Drachma and they would loose 90%  on their euros exchanging them ..... it sounds a nightmare  pensions ect will not be paid as the gov will have no money and it will send the country into a deep recession. 

Our stockmarket is being decimated already 

[gleee58]

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@amalan11 wrote:

It was interesting  they chose no ... im very curious as to whether  it will work for them and Europe will give them more money or will they be left with no money. Realy if you refuse to pay a loan back the lender is crazy to give you more so interesting  times

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It seemed to be a vicious circle.  The severe austerity measures seem to impact the economy to such an extent they struggle to meet the agreed repayments.  From what I read it seems the govt wanted to slow the time frame for repayments to avoid further damage and to enable growth so the repayments could be met without such severe impacts.

[icyfroth]

Greece — The One Biggest Lie You Are Being Told By The Media -

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers.

If you remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed securities” for a huge profit to various financial entities in countries around the world.

A big enabler of this criminal activity was another branch of the banking system, the group of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such as Tony Blair joined Goldman Sachs and peddled these dangerous securities to pension funds and municipalities and countries around Europe.

Banks and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.

But this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. There was much more profit to be made in the next three stages!

Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!

Vultures like Goldman Sachs and other big banks profited enormously in three ways: one, they could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual for pennies on the dollar.

Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and insiders such as John Paulson (who recently donated $400 million to Harvard) had made bets that these securities would blow up.

Paulson made billions, and the media celebrated his acumen. (For an analogy, imagine the terrorists betting on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub salt in the wound, the big banks demanded a bailout from the very citizens whose lives the bankers had ruined!

Bankers have chutzpah. In the U.S., they got hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayers and trillions from the Federal Reserve Bank which is nothing but a front group for the bankers.

In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let that sink in for a moment – the supposedly irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers.

Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have unique strategies to weaken the immune system of the host.

One of the proven techniques used by the parasitic international bankers is to downgrade the bonds of a country.

And that’s exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end of 2009. This immediately makes the interest rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it more and more expensive for the country to borrow money or even just roll over the existing bonds.

From 2009 to mid 2010, the yields on 10-year Greek bonds almost tripled! This cruel financial assault brought the Greek government to its knees, and the banksters won their first debt deal of a whopping 110 billion Euros.

- See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/greece-the-one-biggest-lie-you-are-being-told-by-the-media/5460508#stha...

[baybizz]

>> The 5th July 2015 marked a turning point in the history of post-war Europe - the moment when the euro currency began its inevitable collapse - and the European Union project itself started to disintegrate.

>> The Greek ‘No’ vote restricts the EU leadership to two options -  both of them nightmarish:

>> They can either allow Greece to impose its own terms for staying in the euro, and so abandon the EU-imposed austerity policies that have destroyed the national economy. Or they can force Greece to abandon the euro, and go back to its own currency, the Drachma.

>> Leaving the euro would certainly bring immense uncertainty to an already chaotic Greece. But at least with its own national bank, Greece could set its own interest rates and make its own spending decisions. No longer under the control of Brussels commissars and foreign bankers, the economy in time would have a fighting chance of flourishing once again.

>> The country could start to recover after a period of chaos. The drachma would depreciate precipitously, making Greece far more competitive than countries still imprisoned in the eurozone. Tourism, for example, would boom because holidays in Greece would be so much cheaper.

>> Crucially, this was the experience of Argentina after its national currency, the peso, sensationally decoupled from the U.S. dollar in 2002. The economy grew at an amazing annual rate of 9 per cent between 2003 and 2007.

>> It would, of course, be a total disaster for the European project if Greece, freed from the shackles of the euro, mirrored Argentina’s success. Rival European states stuck inside the stagnating eurozone would study the Greek economy at first with disbelief, then amazement and finally with envy. Then, one by one, they would follow the example of Greece and break away from the eurozone.

>> Terrible risks lie ahead, but the Greek leader Tsipras has already achieved something extraordinary. The idea of democracy was invented in Greece 2,500 years ago. Thanks to him, democracy inside the eurozone, snuffed out by the euro single currency, was reborn in Greece on Sunday...

www.dailymail.co.uk/article-3151687/greece-no-end-of-euro-eu

[donnashuggy]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/07/help-greece-go-on-holiday-cheap-beautiful?CMP=fb_gu

[lind9650]

Thank you Donna.

This letter should be spread all over the Internet. Although I have no greek connections, if I had the money to travel overseas, I would choose to go to Greece at this stage to help a Nation recover.

Grek people will prove that through hard work and solidarity they'll be able to get through a tough and trying time and emerging on top of adversity.

Erica

[donnashuggy]

Yes I have been sharing it around, such a logical thing to help although I did check the flights and they look expensive still

[icyfroth]

My son is going for a holiday in Greece in the next few weeks.

I wouldn't mind going on one myself, but I just got back from hols.

An influx of tourists will help, but they really need to get their industries eg shipping which is their strong point, back into operation to be able to get out of the hole.

[donnashuggy]

My son is loving it there icy. He has just been in India and Nepal so probably enjoying a bit of comfort (very cheaply)

[icyfroth]

There's a lot of goodwill for Greece going it alone at the moment

[baybizz]

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33457251

Interesting chart showing who is propping up Greece and the euro/EU. No wonder German voters are not best pleased with this saga. Even the UK is going to be stung - if my calculation is correct 10.8bn euros works out at 169 euros (£121, $AU 251, $US 186) that each Brit is going to be paying out for this farce.