to think that Greece needs humanitarian aid, not bail-outs?

[AKMD]

Hospitals are begging charities for essential drugs.
HCPs are starting to see cases of malnourished babies.
People are cutting down trees to heat their homes.
Hundreds of thousands of people cannot afford to feed themselves adequately.

Isn't this starting to look a bit more like a humanitarian crisis than an economic wobble? I can't help thinking that if Greece swallowed its pride and left the Euro rather than let everyone else prop them up then it would be an awful lot easier for ordinary people to get the help they need. Shouldn't we be sending out MSF and food stations?

Where are all the rich Greeks who evaded tax all those years? If they had any conscience they'd be stumping up some cash now. Perhaps their hidden stashes ought to be tracked down and forcibly taken back.

As sorry as I feel for them, all Greeks are to blame for this, rich a nd not so rich - it wasn't just the rich and privileged who took advantage - they were all living in a ludicrously overindulgent bubble with a culture of tax evasion, laziness, overpayment, ridiculously early retirement with gold plated pensions, and it was allowed to persist for far too long. It's the young ones I feel most sorry for - they have no hope of a decent future for such a very very long time, and none of it is their fault.

Will we now find hundreds of thousands (or millions? ) of Greeks arriving in the UK?

overturning the ruling that billionaire shipping magnets are exempt from tax because of the 'prestige' they bring the country would be a good start.

Well, a lot of the money is (apparently) invested in property in fancier areas of London, pushing up house prices.

Plenty of rich Greeks, sell a yacht.

Also, hosting an Olympics which costs billions and has been shown time and time again to provide no economic benefit to the host country also didn't help.

Remind me again which naive country is hosting the Olympics this time around?

Seriously, no seriously you think the Greek debt crisis can be solved by closing tax loopholes? You really ought to phone Merkel and Baroso and let them know it is that simple.

I guess the same theory is going to apply in Spain, Italy and France? And why did no-one tell the Irish?

Personally I'm dead glad to hear that the banks aren't in any way to blame.

Maybe also the Greek government lying for around 30 years about its incomings and outgoings and spending WAY more that it actually had in revenue caused some slight problems

Is it ordinary people's fault if they have elected idiots who ran the country to the ground?

Yes Abs because NO-ONE else did this causing sub-prime chaos which kicked off the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no tax evaders and that the Govt there doesn't need to get itself in order. BUT this is not the fault of normal Greek people yet they are the ones suffering, carrying the burden and being insulted as fare dodgers on Mumsnet!

If only voters in every country had decent political choice.

Many people, many governments did. It's just the Greek government took it to a whole new level.

Obviously, it's more than one factor - if it was as simple as "make Greeks pay tax" it would be fabulous, but there were many many factors at play:

• falsified accounting by the Greek government and decades of profligacy
• the euro - a united currency without united fiscal policies or decision making was pretty much doomed from the start
• a global major economic crisis
• property price bubbles
• more interconnectedness of markets, so problems with sub-prime mortgages in the US really is now a problem for lenders in Greece

There's a book called "this time is different - five centuries of financial folly" which is about how overly optimistic policy makers and governments can be about the economy. There are countries, like Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland that have been economically unstable, and have defaulted on government bonds, for centuries. This isn't just something that has happened in the past few years, it is a systemic issue.

If you think about a lot of European countries about three/four decades ago - they had huge problems with poverty. Places like Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain had emigration due to lack of jobs/poverty up until the 1970s, even 1980s. It's only with the advent of the euro that these poorer countries were kind of dragged up and given a chance to develop, but now it's going wrong.

Hearts you can blame the banks for a lot of things but not for Greece. The Greek economy has been running a structural deficit for decades. They fudged their way into the Euro and then the Euro convergence criteria were softened by the politicians.

The main effect of the banking crisis on Greece is to finally stop propping up an economy that is built on quicksand.

This: "Ah well sums up their mentality" is disgusting Novack. Shame on you.

Chaz sorry but the bail-out money is being used to prop up the banking system to protect the crisis from spreading further across Europe. Thus the banks are to blame for the appalling situation of the Greek people.

Abs - that is a great post and I completely agree with your analysis. There is a similar and equally interesting situation in the insurance and reinsurance markets. It's called long-tail risk where it is pretty much a matter of hot potatoes if you're the one tracked down to be holding the baby (mixed analogy!) when it all goes tits up.

Chaz - apologies I mis-read your post. I heartily agree with what you say about the legacy impact of the Greek national accounts and the euro mishmash.

My quibble with some of the earlier posts is the assumption that somehow the Greek people are to blame and therefore it doesn't matter if they are suffering because they are fare dodgers and have brought it on themselves. Paraphrasing somewhat but you get my gist.

some of the Greek people are to blame. If rich people don't pay their taxes their poor suffer. If the Greek government allowed this to happen for a long time, they are to blame. No good blaming everything on outside forces.
And don;t compare greece to Ireland, we are not in the same position.

You are in exactly the same position - living with an austerity budget forced upon you by outside your Government. And some rich Irish people will have dodged their taxes and been greedy and taken advantage of a property bubble.

But same as Greece most will have been quite innocently going about their business and paying their taxes.

I do have some sympathy (and agree with Abs bullet points on the combined causes) but my friends and I were discussing this on the weekend (one of whom is half-Greek) and she was saying it's hard to be overly understanding when most of her father's siblings were in civil service roles and have been retired since 45! How did they think their economy could support this when much larger economies couldn't? What I do find really shitty is the attitude of some Greek people to Germany over this - if one of your DC ate all their easter eggs and then started bawling over other DC being mean and not handing over their easter eggs most mums would be giving greedy DC short shrift and I'm afraid it feels like that.

The economic crisis is EVERY bank's fault - there will be no bank that has not either issued their own or bought into CDOs (the sub-prime mortgages all mixed together with a bit of better graded debt and then sliced up and given the better quality's debt credit rating), who have not hedged their risk with CDS (which is why insurers like AIG have suffered because credit default swaps are essentially insurance for your counterparty going bust and someone has to pay ultimately) and who do not trade derivatives (the whole business whereby you don't have to own shares to short sell them or own commodities to sell them either - gambling on the price of things).

The banks control the economy now due to their ability to 'create' money by issuing debt (EU are now calling this 'shadow banking'). Regulators are now talking about ways to tighten this up but essentially they're not going to pull the plug on financial instruments like CDOs, CDSs or derivatives because it would cause a crash much much much greater than what we've seen so essentially we are now trapped.

But you say this like the Greeks are somehow unique in this situation.

In some parts of this country most employment was through the civil service.

And we are certainly still in denial about when we can retire and our Government won't face up to it and tell the truth because they don't want to be the harbingers of doom and lose the next election.

Wheezo

The banks control the economy now due to their ability to 'create' money by issuing debt (EU are now calling this 'shadow banking').

I really do not understand what you are saying here.

Shadow Banking is not to do with Banks - that's the point (hence why it is called Shadow Banking not Banking). Its the provision of quasi financial services / financial transactions by non Bank entities. This non-Bank entities (e.g. hedge funds) are not subject to the same regulatory controls as Banks that is why the EU is looking into whether or not shadow banking needs to be regulated.

I think your Easter egg would be more if two families were given eggs, one family saved eggs for all, one family had the parents eat all the eggs, come Easter Sunday, the kids were crying they had no eggs and didn't blame their parents, the whole second family looked to the first family. Are the kids at fault?

I'm reading a book about this at the moment.

Everyone should bear in mind that the IMF, Eurozone countries, central banks and investment banks all colluded in the blindness, biases, dodgy lending
and risk-taking that led up to this. The Greeks may have a more skewed system than most but they most certainly did not get here on their own. And even if they did, what kind of mentality is it just to shrug at such terrible hardship and say they brought it on themselves? What can ordinary people do about macro-economic decisions? If the UK went tits up tomorrow, how personally responsible would you feel?

I think that Greece needs a renegotiation of the austerity package. Nothing will be achieved if Greek society implodes under the hardship they are currently experiencing. We have to ameliorate some of the deal's effects now, in exchange for fundamental systemic reform (such as taxing shipping billionaires).

We are not even remotely in the same position. We have no soup kitchens for the middle classes here, no-one is leaving their children at orphanages, we are not marching in the streets.

And a far smaller percentage of people are tax dodgers, we never retired at 50 on full pay for large sections of the work force, we have a better welfare system,and on and on.

We are nothing like Greece.

I love Greece and the people, holidayed there regularly since late 1970s.
The current situation is dreadful.
My biggest frustration has always been their failure to pay tax and consequent lack of investment in the infrastructure of the country, in particular the tourist resorts which are so important.
No pavements, no promenades, no street lights, no parks, no car parks, no playgrounds. Not to mention the classic building with no roof just steel rods poking through - because incomplete buildings are not taxed.
I remember sitting in a restaurant 30 years ago when the owner rushed around putting totally fictitious bills on all the tables. With a wink at the customers he said he had been tipped off that the tax man was coming.