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

[Dinner]

I have always been against the minimum wage and, yes, the New Deal did an amazing amout of public good. Perhaps you don't actually know what the details of the New Deal were thus your confusion?

[Dinner]

Speaking of irrelevancies, what world dominating company did Greece have that collapsed like Nokia?

I am just going to say there is a reason the few attempts at a Greek auto industry failed in the market place. Check out this hideous beast from 1974.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorion_Chicago

[The Mad Monk]

A production line was started with four vehicles at various stages of construction, when a change of Greek law condemned the market prospects of the car. Only two complete vehicles were made and sold before the venture was terminated in 1976.[2] One is exhibited in the Thessaloniki Science Center and Technology Museum.[3] The second car is believed to have ended up in a private collection abroad.

I am curious about the law in question; it may provide a reason for the failure, just not the one you appear to be claiming.

[giblets]

I have always been against the minimum wage and, yes, the New Deal did an amazing amout of public good. Perhaps you don't actually know what the details of the New Deal were thus your confusion?

There’s been a lot of recent debate about Cole and Ohanian’s claim that FDR’s New Deal slowed the recovery. Here I’ll focus on his high wage policies, which Krugman argues could have actually increased output (as the AD curve may slope upward in a liquidity trap.) While there are lots of sophisticated econometric studies (often using highly misleading annual data), I don’t know of anyone else who has simply looked at the monthly industrial production data around each wage shock.

There were actually five wage shocks, four of which are easily dated. As part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, FDR ordered an across the board 20% hourly wage increase in late July 1933, and then further increases in the spring of 1934. At the same time the workweek was reduced about 20%. The NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935, but a minimum wage was instituted in November 1938, and raised a year later. To say the IP data is bad for the Krugman interpretation would be an understatement. These numbers are horrendous:

Table 12.2: Four month (nonannualized!) growth rates for industrial production

Before After
July 1933 wage shock +57.4% -18.8%
May 1934 wage shock +11.9% -15.0%
Nov. 1938 wage shock +15.8% +2.5%
Nov. 1939 wage shock +16.0% -6.5%

You’ll notice that I left out the fifth wage shock, but its no better for Krugman’s view, just messier. Historians argue that the huge union drives of late 1936 and 1937 were due to both the Wagner Act and FDR’s massive election victory. Whatever the cause of the union gains, they led to rapid wage increases in late 1936 and much of 1937. This time, monthly industrial production did not fall immediately, as prices were also rising fast in late 1936 and early 1937. But when prices stopped rising, industrial production began falling sharply under the burden of high wages.

Progressives like to portray opponents of the New Deal as reactionaries. Parts of the New Deal (such as dollar devaluation) were very helpful. But FDR’s high wage policy was a disaster. As James Hamilton said (in defending his criticism of programs like the NIRA and the AAA):

I openly confess to believing that government policies that were explicitly designed to limit manufacturing, agricultural, and mining output may indeed have had the effect of limiting manufacturing, agricultural, and mining output.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=48

If you're against the minimum wage then why are you so fond of the New Deal

[Fake Boris]

I have always been against the minimum wage and, yes, the New Deal did an amazing amout of public good. Perhaps you don't actually know what the details of the New Deal were thus your confusion?

Then why were you complaining that Mexicans steal jobs by working for less than minimum wage?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

some "behind the scenes" of the Greek Tragedy

a snippet

Did they really believe austerity was the only way to keep Greece within the eurozone?

“It is a very cynical, utilitarian view that in order to forge the future you have to sacrifice unproductive people who are good for nothing. Now, the smarter ones – and there are very few smart ones – can see that this is all rubbish. They could see that the program they were implementing was catastrophic. But they were cynical. They thought, I know which side my bread is buttered.

“Interestingly enough, the finance minister of Germany is a man who understands this better than anyone. In a break during a meeting, I asked him, ‘Would you sign this, this agreement?’ and he said, ‘No, I wouldn’t. This is no good for your people.’ This is the most frustrating part of it, that at the personal level you can have this human conversation, but in meetings it is impossible to bring it up, it is impossible to have humanity inform policy-making. The policy debate is structured in such a way that humanity has to be left outside the room.”

Varoufakis has made clear that self-interest and careerism are at play within these negotiations. But if statespeople are making decisions based on policies they don’t believe in, isn’t there also cowardice at play?

“Let me try to answer as accurately as I can by saying this. Of my colleagues in the Eurogroup …” – he corrects himself – “former colleagues in the Eurogroup – I am no longer in the Eurogroup, thank God – it was often said it was 18 against one, that I was alone. It’s not true, it is not true. A very small minority, led by the German finance minister, pretended to believe – pretended to believe – that the austerity that was being forced on the Greeks was the only way out, was the best thing for the Greeks, and if we were only to reform ourselves along the lines of that austerian logic then we would be fine, that we are not getting out of the woods because we are lazy, we live off other people’s kindness, etc. etc. But they were a minority. There were two other groups that were more significant.

“One group consisted of the finance ministers who don’t believe in these policies but who had been forced in the past to impose them on their own people with great detrimental consequences. Now, this group was terrified of the prospect that we would succeed because they would have to answer to their own people … Why were they such cowards?”

“And there was a third group, France and Italy. These are important countries, frontline states of Europe, and the way I would characterise it is that their finance ministers neither believed in austerity nor had they practised it seriously. But what they feared was that if they sided with us, if they are seen to be sympathetic to the Greeks, they would encounter the wrath of the Teutonic group and maybe austerity would be imposed on them. They didn’t want to be seen supporting us in case they would be forced to suffer the same indignities.”

Also, how austerity works in practice

Our state apparatus had been contaminated by the Troika, very, very badly. Let me give you an example. There is something called the Hellenic Financial Stability Facility, which is an offshoot of the European Financial Stability Facility [EFSF]. This is a fund that contained initially €50 billion – by the time I took over it was €11 billion – for the purpose of recapitalising the Greek banks. This is money that the taxpayers of Greece have borrowed for the purpose of bolstering the banks. I didn’t get to choose its CEO and I didn’t get to have any impact on the way it ran its affairs vis-à-vis the Greek banks. The Greek people who had elected me had no control on how the money they had borrowed was going to be used.

“I discovered at some point that the law that constituted the EFSF allowed me one power, and that was to determine the salary of these people. I realised that the salaries of these functionaries were monstrous by Greek standards. In a country with so much hunger and where the minimum wage has fallen to €520 a month, these people were making something like €18,000 a month.

“So I decided, since I had the power, I would exercise that power. I used a really simple rule. Pensions and salaries have fallen by an average of 40% since the beginning of the crisis. I issued a ministerial decree by which I reduced the salaries of these functionaries by 40%. Still a huge salary, still a huge salary. You know what happened? I got a letter from the Troika, saying that my decision has been overruled as it was insufficiently explained. So in a country in which the Troika is insisting that people on a €300-a-month pension now live on €100, they were refusing my cost-cutting exercise, my ability as a minister of finance to curtail the salaries of these people.”

classic

[Dinner]

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=48

If you're against the minimum wage then why are you so fond of the New Deal

the minimum wage was one policy out of around 30,000. Surely someone can disagree with one yet still think the other 29,999 were pretty good on average.

[pchang]

Prices are now low enough that Ronaldo can afford to give away a Greek Island.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2...aign=editorial

[Bereta_Eder]

As usual the bull**** on this thread is so much if you don't have a sea you can swimn in it.
There are a handfull of islets, very small islands, that were are and will be private.
Aristotle Onassis had one (the Scorpio, now sold to a russian tycoon), and then some few people.
Not one island has been put to sale.
What privates do with their very limited islets, is their own business, and the price in which they are sold is a transaction between privates and the state has no business in it, except collect the tax money of the transaction

[PLATO]

Glad to see you back BE!

[Bereta_Eder]

thanks

that was the spirit of what I said btw

https://www.google.gr/search?q=cha+ching+galifianakis&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CCEQsARqFQoTCOjOrPG7nscCFQZ_LAodpKoNZQ&biw=1024&bih=639#imgrc=3fUDjZERNtJ4uM%3A

[Bereta_Eder]

I suppose you are all gaping for my comments on what transpired while I was banned and the negotiations were going on.

Syriza managed to **** up the status quo of europe, but caved in at the last minute when the EFS cut off bank support.
(Plan B to leave the euro was voted against 5 to 2 in syriza's council. one vote was varoufakis')

What we are left now is with a no taboo germany hatred all across the EU (minus baltics finland and holland, and shut up dannubis you don't represent belgium )
a program that will not work (again) and the sound laying down of the foundations for a euro collapse.

In portugal schauble is now considered more dangerous than jihadists so the german neoliberalism has been delt a mortal blow.

Greece will not reform, of course (and that's bad in some aspects but you got to deal with the real).

And we go on from here


america italy france (cyprus and austria) has been icremental/essential in us staying in the eurozone for now.

I'm pretty sure that if the US and France were not adamandtly in favor of Greece staying in the euro and basically hard twisted schuable's germany's arm, we would now be out, and the euro itself would have few years of life)
And that would be bad because not so shockingly Greece was nowhere near prepare for that (letting aside for a minute the collapse of the european construct)

[Bereta_Eder]

as for varoufakis' interview that onefoot posted. he's right.
varoufakis CAN identify the bad aspects of nearly every system. But his ideas on how to adress them are a mixture of radicalism that can't be accepted so easily and of, well, inactivity in his domain.

the eurozone is screwed up and that's true and there's no saving it now.
germany's right wing was going full front for a 3rd europe-destruct before it was intercepted by france and the US.

But the structural deficiencies of the eurozone and the absurdity of today's germany remain (and what few allies it has)

On the other hand varoufakis was minister of finance and he needed to act as one.
All the power of syriza went to negotiations and not to try to internally fight the very people it promised it would.

I don't buy that troika overuled anything varoufakis wanted to do.

He's a good university professor but not a good politician. We need good reformists to withstand the shock untill the euro collapses.

My sympathies to him for having grown up in wog country though and to tsiolkas

[pchang]

As usual the bull**** on this thread is so much if you don't have a sea you can swimn in it.
There are a handfull of islets, very small islands, that were are and will be private.
Aristotle Onassis had one (the Scorpio, now sold to a russian tycoon), and then some few people.
Not one island has been put to sale.
What privates do with their very limited islets, is their own business, and the price in which they are sold is a transaction between privates and the state has no business in it, except collect the tax money of the transaction

Your government has agreed to raise a fair amount of money through asset sales. I was just pointing out that valuations are dropping and that your government may have to sell more things than they first thought.

[Bereta_Eder]

That's not exactly the case.

There's a list of privitizations, the same list there was 5 years ago and never went through.
There's a bunch of companies in it, none of which will be sold than one or two, and that's a maybe.

The gov is under no obligation to amass a certain amount of money through privitizations. There are just completely errneous projections about what they might bring assuming (and that's a big ass) they even go through.

Also you can't have a private beach in Greece (constitutionally forbiden) let alone an island.

The 20 out of 6000 islands that are private are (minus an exception or two) small green rocks with some cattle and a chapel.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that their prices are falling though.

The only sure thing is that the debt will be cut.