Options for the EU? - A cartoon from the Lebanese Daily Star

by fulltimestudent 27 Replies latest social current

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  fulltimestudent

  
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  prologos

  Yeah, follow the money trail. how can a small country burn that much borrowed money with nothing to show for? the olympics perhaps? cut them loose and make them pay.
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  Ruby456

  domestic banks in the UK own 10.8 billion of Greece's debt and Spain (not exactly a rich country) owns a massive 25 billion (their contribution to the EU bailout). I feel very sorry for Greek people on the ground but ontoh....
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  jhine

  The decision to adopt the Euro was not taken by the Greek people . They , didn't want it . It was the politicians that opened that can of worms .

  Jan
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  prologos

  what happened to all that borrowed money, and why on earth would you give them more?

  The bible is wrong: the creditor The EU IMF, Germany has become the slave to the debtor Greece, :

  " keep paying or I will not pay you back!"
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  kaik

  Greece is broken beyond help. It is unfortunate, but nobody can fix their own mess except Greek alone. They need to figure out a way how to make their economy growing. However, they cornered themselves into the position, and their elective leadership isolate Greece from rest of Europe. They are without ally. I expect total disintegration of their economy, because their banking system had collapsed, and they would need at least 90 billions to restart the economy, which is 1% of GDP of EU. However, ECB would need to get all other 18 members to vote on it unanimously, which they wont. All of Eastern EU member are deeply against Greece, and Slovakia called for expulsion of them from EU.
  

  Greece needs to reform and modernize their economy to be strong and enable generate extensive export. Greek export 1/3 of good what is generated by much smaller Slovakia. Czech Republic with the same population size, export 6x more. Yet, all these countries have lower income and lower per capita output than Greece. Something went horrible wrong in the past decade in the Greek economy. The leadership that is responsible for it should be jailed. Austerity only deepened the misery and very little was done in reforming the system.

  With collapsing system, Greece may experience a military junta, and leave NATO and EU all together.
  
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  St George of England

  My old boss used to say:- "Never throw good money after bad!"

  George
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  The Searcher

  I'm not certain, but to qualify for membership of the E.U. - and especially to join the Euro - a country has to open its "books" to show that it can fulfil certain fiscal requirements before they can join - e.g. taxation capabilities & GDP.

  The E.U. Commissioners actually examined Greece's books and said they were good???????
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  coalize

  I make you remember than 4 years ago, when some banks made mess, "we" found 2 000 billions dollars in few days to save them...

  Now, for a country who made mess, that is to say human people, they don't find 50 little billions dollars?
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  LoveUniHateExams

  First, I feel very sorry for the people of Greece. I'm largely ignorant of the ins and outs of what happened here.

  It seems that Greece had been living beyond its means in the years leading up to this. I read somewhere that the EU cooked the books so that Greece could join the Eurozone, thus giving Eurocrats a grand circle-jerk opportunity.

  This has affected every country in the Eurozone. Thank God Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, stopped Tony Blair from joining this one-size-fits-all madness.

  The take-home point for me is that there urgently needs to be wholesale reform within the EU. Apparently, the last time it successfully balanced its books was in 1995 or 1996. Completely unacceptable.

  This entire issue has been a lesson in economics - how not to do it.