Well, simple arithmetic suggests that it's actually €24bn, not €13bn. Unless we take it for granted that the period between May 2nd and May 20th has some sort of automatic free pass thrown in.
This isn't going to work, is it? My bet would be on the EU money stalling, just because the EU can't agree on anything in a fourteen-day period. But even if I'm wrong, that's a whole three years of riots, strikes, and general Greekiness coming up. It's not as if they don't do that sort of thing in normal times.
As usual with economic pontificators (not you -- the IMF, the ECB, and so on), the cultural dimension has been entirely missed. Ireland/Spain/the UK is not Greece, indeed. But they're not Greece, because they're entirely different cultures -- not because of numerical data.
Greece has been a seriously schizophrenic society since the end of the Colonels. It's got the most opaque military budget in Europe, to satisfy nationalists and fascist hangers-on. It's got a set of plutocrats entrenched in the political system who keep their money offshore wherever possible. It's got a ridiculously bloated public sector and a general leftist/statist tendency that harks back to the good old days of 1946-8, when the Communist partisans were battling the American-backed fascists. In short, it looks more like Saddam's Iraq (minus torture cells and mustard gas) than it does like a modern European country. Why the hell the Germans let them into the Euro is entirely beyond me.
The Euro is near death. If you remember, you predicted something like 2014, and I predicted something like 2012. I now take this back. It'll be lucky to last the rest of this year.
no subject
This isn't going to work, is it? My bet would be on the EU money stalling, just because the EU can't agree on anything in a fourteen-day period. But even if I'm wrong, that's a whole three years of riots, strikes, and general Greekiness coming up. It's not as if they don't do that sort of thing in normal times.
As usual with economic pontificators (not you -- the IMF, the ECB, and so on), the cultural dimension has been entirely missed. Ireland/Spain/the UK is not Greece, indeed. But they're not Greece, because they're entirely different cultures -- not because of numerical data.
Greece has been a seriously schizophrenic society since the end of the Colonels. It's got the most opaque military budget in Europe, to satisfy nationalists and fascist hangers-on. It's got a set of plutocrats entrenched in the political system who keep their money offshore wherever possible. It's got a ridiculously bloated public sector and a general leftist/statist tendency that harks back to the good old days of 1946-8, when the Communist partisans were battling the American-backed fascists. In short, it looks more like Saddam's Iraq (minus torture cells and mustard gas) than it does like a modern European country. Why the hell the Germans let them into the Euro is entirely beyond me.
The Euro is near death. If you remember, you predicted something like 2014, and I predicted something like 2012. I now take this back. It'll be lucky to last the rest of this year.