[civil] "Greece moves closer to eurozone exit after delaying €300m repayment to IMF "

[Sir Og]

It's a crap deal. (if you can even call it that) Typical of EU politics.
We'll see what the Greek parliament does in the next two days...

How is rising VAT on tourism even supposed to help Greece?! EU bureaucrats are beyond retarded. Their only agenda is to save face and not admit what a massive failure the EZ is.
The sad irony is that they think they are saving the EU this way but the Euro so far has made the most to shake the future of the union. And it will continue to do so down the road, there is no way around it.

Tight money always leads to the most retarded attempts at "fixing" the economy.

[Sir Og]

not quite JM

[dannubis]

It will not pass Greek parliament.
So Greece can be blamed for the Grexit.

I think it is obvious.

[pchang]

So what did Finland get from Germany?

[Dinner]

They still should be kicked out of the Euro for lying their way in but liberalizations can only help. If it gets them out of last place in the EU wrt market freedom then some good will be done.

[Dinner]

Bottom line this is a very rare thing. A Greek politician who wants to take a hit doing the right thing. This doesn't happen very often and it would be far worse if they didn't do this.

I think Syriza has stared into the black hole and figured out everything would be worse if they didn't.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Noone seems to have posted that even the IMF supports debt relief now

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has fiercely criticised the bailout deal offered to Greece by the eurozone.

It said Greece's public debt was now "highly unsustainable" and urged debt relief on a scale "well beyond what has been under consideration to date".

Late on Tuesday, the IMF made public advice it had given to the Eurogroup of finance ministers at the weekend.

That advice included proposals that would see some of Greece's enormous debt written off.

A statement like this a little earlier would not have hurt, but I guess the US looks at EU infighting, thinking - weak EU, that's OK, but it looks like Washington miscalculated that the whole thing is so weak that it will self-implode any moment, so they have decided to put some weight behind the rational side of the argument.

EU - what a disorganized mess, lead by apparatchiks that Breznhev would be proud of.

[C0ckney]

well it's nice that they've admitted the obvious, even if it's far too late.

[C0ckney]

i liked this bit.

The IMF also said it regarded forecast rates of growth for Greece as unrealistically high.

given the record of everyone's (including the IMF's) predictions about greece since the start of the crisis, it seems that they'd be better off, frankly, examining chicken entrails.

[Sir Og]

Performance of countires in the eurozone and countries pegged to the euro vs countries with independent currencies (with floating exchange rates)



This illustrates what a massive failure the common currency is. We are looking at trillions of missed wealth and totally avoidable suffering.

From day one the correct solution for Greece was to leave the euro. They would have been like Iceland, easily outperforming the average eurozone country.

[pchang]

As if that is the only reason for economic performance....

[Sir Og]

Of course it isn't the only factor.

But it would be an extremely unlikely coincidence that all those other factors (like poor "national character" for example) are all clustered in countries that are part of the EZ.

It should be obvious that the euro is a major contributor to the poor performance of countries like Greece.

[pchang]

What's the difference between Greece and Malta?

In any case, the Greek Parliament passed all the laws required. How will the Bundestag vote?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Malta is a 450k people mostly English speaking island in the Mediterranean, which relies on shipping, tourism and service industry (English) to make it work out for them. They did not suffer WWII occupation, overthrow of domestic government and 5 year civil war by the western powers post WWII, and another overthrow in 1967.

What about the difference between Finland and Malta? Finnish economy contracted as well in the last decade.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

A bit more on IMF seeing the light.

There is both an economic and geopolitical dimension to the US critique. Put simply, the US approach to economics during the crisis and its aftermath has been to put growth before deficit reduction. The idea was to get the economy moving first, then turn to sorting out the public finances. Europe, exemplified by Germany, has taken the opposite approach. The evidence suggests that the US approach works better.

Even so, Greece wouldn’t matter so much to the Americans were it not for the fact that it is seen as a key member of Nato in the eastern Mediterranean, a region that the US thinks is already unstable enough. Washington is worried about the conflict in Ukraine. It is worried about the civil war in Syria. It is worried about Turkey. It is worried about the possibility that a Greece outside the euro and desperate for foreign cash would cosy up to Moscow and Beijing. All things considered, Obama thinks it is worth being a lot more generous to Greece in order to ensure that it doesn’t leave the euro.

The US has plenty of allies among the other non-European members of the IMF. India, Brazil and China all expressed misgivings about the original bailout in 2010 and – on the basis of the debt sustainability analysis – will see the latest plan as throwing good money after bad. The US probably doesn’t need to use its veto power to block IMF involvement in a third bailout: the organisation would have to break its own rules and go against the wishes of many of its member countries in order to do so.

Let's see how much do the Germans listen to their American masters, over next couple of days.

US playing the reasonable guy here, for a change.