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

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Well, those are your Finnish friends for you.

As a wise man once said "Evil, evil, Finland".

[pchang]

A lot of tech companies are opening up support centers in Poland. Greece has plenty of college graduates with computer related degrees who speak English, French, or German. If Greece opened up like Poland, they could have plenty of new jobs.....

[C0ckney]

there are many of these support centres in greece already for various industries. i was rather oddly offered a job in one about a year ago.

[Sir Og]

Can anyone who thinks money is not the biggest issue here provide a sigle example from history where a country managed to make the magnitude of nominal changes that are required from Greece?

Any country, any period in history (although it will be better to stick to more recent times eg. after 1900CE because data is more reliable and easily verifyable) Gold standard, currency pegs, sigle currency without fiscal union all qualify as monetary policies not allowing natural corection of real incomes.

Also bare in mind that Greece is already the country that made the biggest nominal corrections in the EZ. Obviously that is not enough but we are looking for examples where some country managed to do enough.

[DinoDoc]

Can anyone who thinks money is not the biggest issue here provide a sigle example from history where a country managed to make the magnitude of nominal changes that are required from Greece?

Any country, any period in history (although it will be better to stick to more recent times eg. after 1900CE because data is more reliable and easily verifyable) Gold standard, currency pegs, sigle currency without fiscal union all qualify as monetary policies not allowing natural corection of real incomes.

Also bare in mind that Greece is already the country that made the biggest nominal corrections in the EZ. Obviously that is not enough but we are looking for examples where some country managed to do enough.

Latvian lessons

[Dinner]

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-greece-bailout-commitments-20150713-story.html

The reforms look pretty good for a first step but they need to do still more. Eliminating the minimum wage and further deregulation of nonfinancial sectors would go a long way towards decreasing unemployment and getting the economy moving again.

[giblets]

Eliminating the minimum wage? I thought Dinner was a partisan Democrat?

[pchang]

Latvian lessons

Yes, well you have your super villain income from blackmailing the world to help bolster your country's finances.......

[Dinner]

Eliminating the minimum wage? I thought Dinner was a partisan Democrat?

Not on that issue. The US needs to exempt Puerto Rico as well as something like 80% of the jobs in PR are minimum wage and that is atleast 50% higher than all the nearby islands so no one invests there.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Latvian lessons

Latvian lessons indeed

The New York Times had a really bizarre article the other day about Latvia‘s “success” with austerity and internal devaluation. The story makes a number of points but I feel that its main point is effectively conveyed by this paragraph:

In just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

Other writers such as Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman have already pounced on this, but I wanted to weigh in because I think it’s important to place Latvia’s “success” in some regional context, namely a comparison with its giant, not-very-competitive, and unloved neighbor Russia.

Russia, we hear, is a place suffering from a serious “brain drain” and from an even more serious “demographic crisis.” It’s a place where the rebound from the global financial crisis has been decidedly mediocre and where post-crisis growth pales in comparison to pre-crisis levels of expansion. It’s a place whose economy is routinely described as unstable, primitive, inefficient, and even as being on the verge of complete and utter collapse. In short, it’s the sort of place that would never, ever, be called a “success” by the Very Serious People at the New York Times or the IMF.

So, using data from the World Bank, Rosstat, and Eurostat, I thought I would throw together a few charts that shows just how awful Latvia’s performance has been over the past few years. If this is “success” I would really had to see what failure looks like.
.
I’m not in any way suggesting that the Latvians “aren’t allowed” to make these sorts of decisions – it’s a sovereign and democratic country and the savage austerity measures of the past few years have repeatedly been endorsed at the ballot box. Latvians are, evidently, convinced that austerity is the preferable policy and that’s entirely their choice to make. But if another less friendly country, say Russia, had suffered the sort of protracted misery, mass emigration, and collapse in living standards that Latvia has witnessed over the past four years, people would be screaming bloody murder. And rightfully so! If roughly 5% of a given country’s population is so disillusioned that they simply pack up and leave that is an incredibly damning indictment of that country.

Latvia has, in many ways, made a great deal of progress since its independence from the Soviet Union and it’s been heartening to see the country integrate into the European structures from which it was arbitrarily and artificially removed. But anyone who gives a whit about actual, living Latvians will not be leading any cheers for the country’s austerity drive since, by virtually any measure, it’s left them massively worse off.

There are also some pretty graphs for comparison between the two in the article, but basically 25% points less growth, 10% points more reduction of working population, ie people simply left the country, and 10% higher unemployment five years after the start of the crisis vs Russia of all places. Great "success" indeed.

Greece may also be successful after enough of them leave (for a bit, as they are less converged with Germany than Latvia in the first place), but it will require a larger move of population than in Latvia where about 5% of them left, in Greece this should be closer to 25%.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Here is also another article on the effect of last 5 years of EU policy on the country, whose government just signed up for more of the same.











PChang and Oerdin naturally want to punish the Greeks, they need more punishment, like their grandparents needed punishment in 1930's.

Surely it is the people who are to blame for the inept governments they were previously electing just like the US poor deserve what they have coming for electing from the great presidential candidate choices they are presented with every four years!

[pchang]

The beauty and curse of fair and free elections: ultimately, the people get what they deserve.

[Sir Og]

The beauty and curse of fair and free elections: ultimately, the people get what they deserve.

[N35t0r]

And if they don't, there's always the possibility of a coup.

[C0ckney]

The beauty and curse of fair and free elections: ultimately, the people get what they deserve.

says the man who was moaning about "bread and circuses" a couple of pages back.