Greece & the €uro Crisis.

TigaSefi wrote:So just to be clear, the Greek are now in the same position as however many weeks ago before the new government was put in place ?

bear wrote:

TigaSefi wrote:So just to be clear, the Greek are now in the same position as however many weeks ago before the new government was put in place ?

Much worse. They've managed to get themselves a much worse deal than they could have got, pissed off multiple potential negotiating partners and their banks are practically being run by the EU. I'd consider myself to be left leaning on the political spectrum but Syrizia have handled this awfully from the day they took office.

Lagamorph wrote:Do you wish the Nazis had won WW2 or something? You seem to utterly despise the allied leaders.

Qikz wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:Do you wish the Nazis had won WW2 or something? You seem to utterly despise the allied leaders.

You really can't argue that we didn't cause the [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War"]Greek_Civil_War[/url] and that in turrn strawberry floated up Greece for the past century.

The origins of the civil war lie in the divisions created during World War II over which side to support, and in the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany, Bulgaria and Italy from April 1941 to late October 1944. While Axis forces approached Athens in April 1941, King George II and his government escaped to Egypt, where they proclaimed a government-in-exile, recognised by the Western Allies but not by the Soviet Union. Western leaders (Winston Churchill in particular) encouraged, and even coerced,[citation needed] the King (then George II of Greece) to appoint a moderate cabinet.

Moggy wrote:

Qikz wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:Do you wish the Nazis had won WW2 or something? You seem to utterly despise the allied leaders.

You really can't argue that we didn't cause the [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War"]Greek_Civil_War[/url] and that in turrn strawberry floated up Greece for the past century.

From the opening of your linked article:

The origins of the civil war lie in the divisions created during World War II over which side to support, and in the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany, Bulgaria and Italy from April 1941 to late October 1944. While Axis forces approached Athens in April 1941, King George II and his government escaped to Egypt, where they proclaimed a government-in-exile, recognised by the Western Allies but not by the Soviet Union. Western leaders (Winston Churchill in particular) encouraged, and even coerced,[citation needed] the King (then George II of Greece) to appoint a moderate cabinet.

Sounds like Nazi Germany caused it.

Even now, at 86, when Patríkios “laughs at and with myself that I have reached such an age”, the poet can remember, scene-for-scene, shot for shot, what happened in the central square of Greek political life on the morning of 3 December 1944.

This was the day, those 70 years ago this week, when the British army, still at war with Germany, opened fire upon – and gave locals who had collaborated with the Nazis the guns to fire upon – a civilian crowd demonstrating in support of the partisans with whom Britain had been allied for three years.

The crowd carried Greek, American, British and Soviet flags, and chanted: “Viva Churchill, Viva Roosevelt, Viva Stalin’” in endorsement of the wartime alliance.

Twenty-eight civilians, mostly young boys and girls, were killed and hundreds injured. “We had all thought it would be a demonstration like any other,” Patríkios recalls. “Business as usual. Nobody expected a bloodbath.”

Britain’s logic was brutal and perfidious: Prime minister Winston Churchill considered the influence of the Communist Party within the resistance movement he had backed throughout the war – the National Liberation Front, EAM – to have grown stronger than he had calculated, sufficient to jeopardise his plan to return the Greek king to power and keep Communism at bay. So he switched allegiances to back the supporters of Hitler against his own erstwhile allies.

TigaSefi wrote:So just to be clear, the Greek are now in the same position as however many weeks ago before the new government was put in place ?

1. At the time of the last review in May 2014 (the IMF’s Fifth Review under the extended arrangement), public debt dynamics were considered to be sustainable but highly vulnerable.

2. If the program had been implemented as assumed, no further debt relief would have been needed under the agreed November 2012 framework

3. However, very significant changes in policies and in the outlook since early this year have resulted in a substantial increase in financing needs

4. Financing needs add up to over €50 billion over the three-year period from October 2015 to end–2018

5. It is unlikely that Greece will be able to close its financing gaps from the markets on terms consistent with debt sustainability

6. Even with concessional financing through 2018, debt would remain very high for decades and highly vulnerable to shocks

7. Given the extraordinarily concessional terms that now apply to the bulk of Greece’s debt, the debt/GDP ratio is not a very meaningful proxy for the forward-looking debt burden

8. If the program were implemented as specified at the last review, debt servicing would have been within the recommended threshold of 15 percent of GDP on average during 2016–45

9. However, the debt dynamics would still be very vulnerable

10. Given the fragile debt dynamics, further concessions are necessary to restore debt sustainability

11. Under the Fund’s exceptional access criteria, debt sustainability needs to be assessed with high probability

12. The analysis is robust to somewhat lower growth and primary surplus targets.

The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has decided to step down and call snap elections for 20 September, government officials said.

As the debt-crippled country received the first tranche of its new €86bn (£61bn) bailout, Tsipras was set to make the formal announcement later on Thursday, government sources told Reuters..
Live Greek PM resigns to trigger snap elections - live updates
Greece will head back to the polling booths next month as Alexis Tsipras decides to resign to tackle dissent within his own party over the bailout
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Once he submits his resignation the prime minister would be replaced by the president of Greece’s supreme court, Vassiliki Thanou-Christophilou – a vocal bailout opponent – who would oversee the elections as the head of a transitional government.

Tsipras won parliamentary backing for the tough bailout programme last week by a comfortable margin despite a large-scale rebellion among members of his ruling leftwing Syriza party, nearly one-third of whose 149 MPs either voted against the deal or abstained. Syriza governs in a coalition with the rightwing, anti-austerity party Independent Greeks (Anel).

The revolt by hardliners angry at what they view as a betrayal of the party’s pledge to fight austerity left Tsipras short of the 120 votes he would need – two-fifths of the 300-seat assembly – to survive a censure motion and he was widely expected to call a confidence vote this week or next.

He has now decided to skip that step, deciding instead to go straight to the country in an attempt to silence rebels and shore up public support for the draconian three-year bailout programme, which entails a radical overhaul of the Greek economy including further tax hikes, spending cuts and major reforms of health, welfare, pensions and taxation.

Tsipras appears to have calculated that it was better to call the elections early, before the effects of the new bailout measures – including further pension cuts, VAT increases and a “solidarity” tax on incomes – started to make themselves felt.
Greek bailout Q&A: What happens next?
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Some analysts had suggested he might wait until early October, by which time Greece’s creditors would have carried out their first review of the country’s progress in meeting the bailout conditions and perhaps come to a decision about debt relief – potentially a major electoral asset for the prime minister.

Under Greece’s complex constitutional laws, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos cannot immediately call an election if Tsipras resigns, but must first consult the other major parties to see if they could form a government – a near impossibility given the current parliamentary arithmetic.

At the end of a bruising seven months of negotiations with Greece’s international creditors, the prime minister eventually signed up to a deal that many in his party view as a U-turn on the anti-austerity platform that swept it to power in elections last January.
Greece crisis timeline: the rocky road to another bailout
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Tsipras has insisted that accepting creditor demands for further tough reforms was the only way to ensure his country remains in the eurozone, which is a key demand among the electorate according to opinion polls.

Syriza is now thought likely to formally split. The leader of its dissident Left Platform, the former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, announced last week he intended to form a new anti-bailout movement, accusing the government of capitulating to the “dictatorship of the eurozone”.

The prime minister’s closest aides had said on Thursday that the divisions within Syriza had to be dealt with one way or another. The energy minister, Panos Skourletis, told state broadcaster ERT: “The political landscape must clear up. We need to know whether the government has or does not have a majority.”
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The party is now thought likely to call an extraordinary congress in September to resolve its internal differences.

Recent opinion polls have put support for Syriza at around 33-34%, making it by far the country’s most popular party – but not popular enough to govern without a coalition partner. No polls have been published since then, but Syriza insiders remain optimistic.

Dimitris Papadimoulis, a Syriza MEP, told Mega TV: “These elections, whenever they are announced by the government, will provide a stable governing solution. My feeling is that Syriza will have an absolute majority.”

The political uncertainty was taking its toll on markets, with the Athens Stock Exchange down 2.8% in afternoon trading.

Analyst Evangelos Sioutis, who is the head of equities at Guardian Trust Securities, said: “The Greek stock market is coming into a new circle of uncertainty while we are waiting for new elections to be announced. For the stock markets, it is a factor of uncertainty.”

Grumpy David wrote:Hopefully they elect someone with the balls to actually begin the Greek recovery by defaulting and returning to the Drachma.

Late September/early October could still get me a dirt cheap Greek holiday with Drachma as my currency.