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?

And just to clear up a little point - I generally need to heat my home for about two months a year.

I'm not criticising "people" I'm criticising one person who insists she knows a situation of a country she doesn't live in.

I'm basing my comments on the OP and therefore a comparison. And media reports etc. Are you saying the things reported in respectable multinational media are untrue? The articles interviewing people in Greece detailing the things I mentioned are invented and these people don't exist?

Lets go back to the OP:
"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"

None of these things remotely apply to Ireland. If you want to argue that they don't apply to Greece, you go ahead, I'm batting for my own side.

there might have been some isolated incidents of parents giving up their children, just as might happen in any country. It is not widespread. It has been exaggerated in the media.

Illegal logging has always been a problem, it's nothing new

Have you heard of the "All together we can" movement? Ordinary Greeks donate packets of foodstuffs to be distributed among those who need it. Our local basket is always full.

My local pharmacies are still dispensing medicines - apparently there were shortages at just a very few places in central Athens.

You said "we do not need tents to house the homeless, we do not need orphanages to house the children being given up by their parents because they can't feed them"

I don't think Greece needs to build orphanages either!

And yes, there are homeless, mostly in Athens and Thessaloniki. Are you really saying there are no homeless in Ireland?

Do you really believe everything you hear in the media? Really??

It made me laugh when I read on the BBC about left-wing leader Tsipras, and they said he was generally seen as a pin-up in Greece! Not by anyone I have ever spoken to, and certainly not in the Greek media!

Do I believe everything I read in the media? No. This does not mean I believe nothing I read in the media. When I read in a proper sunday supplement interviews with women who have given their children up because they can't feed them, with accompanying picture, I have no reason to doubt it. Do you?

Did I say there were no homeless in Ireland? No. Don't be so silly. I'm commenting on the OP's assertion and the implication that we are also in these dire straits. We are not. If you are not either, why are you not disagreeing with the OP and veryone that followed agreeing, rather than with me? It's rather odd.

The thread began with a question about whether Greece should stop receiving bail-out aid and begin receiving humanitarian aid.

There was then a spate of replies which consisted mainly of saying that the Greeks had got themselves into the mess and therefore didn't deserve anything from anyone. There was a lot of blather about unpaid taxes for example. One person felt that they deserved it because she had seen someone dodge their bus fare.

Responding to this level of debate does lead to conflation of issues because you are not dealing with rational argument in the first place.

Do you live in either Ireland or Greece? If not, shouldn't you probably defer to those that do, what with them actually knowing something about it?

and

I'm not criticising "people" I'm criticising one person who insists she knows a situation of a country she doesn't live in.

Joan, I am sure that if you read these two statements of yours back through you will see how they make any rational debate with you impossible.

"replies which consisted mainly of saying that the Greeks had got themselves into the mess and therefore didn't deserve anything from anyone"

Nobody said that

We said Greeks got themselves into this mess (and they did) in response to those who were saying "Poor Greeks, it wasn't their fault at all". Nobody is against helping them that I can see, though.

Eldritch - There were some very detailed articles at the time about how new government discovered the state of the country after the election - little by little, realizing economic figures are all fiction, that there are hidden debts everywhere, and that there is no money in the coffers. Fascinating stuff.

Cote: some early examples for you:

Ah well sums up their mentality does it not that someone else will have to take care of their life.

Boarding buses in Greece, noted that the tourists pay but rarely get a ticket and the locals don't appear to pay at all.

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

If they paid their taxes like the rest of us they would not be in this shit

I particularly like the last one and do hope that person has been listening to Today this morning.

Examples of what? None of those are saying we shouldn't be helping Greeks.

They are saying they are hugely responsible for their country's bankruptcy.

Which is not wrong.

Righty ho, they are obviously great examples of logical analysis of a complex and globally inter-linked problem

Everyone is responsible for the current state.

People in America who took advantage of the mortgage offers without a thought of how to pay them back

People in Spain who carried on building houses without a thought for who would actually live there

Governments who failed to regulate the banks

Banks who failed to understand the nature of the risks they were taking on

Ratings agencies who failed to report the true nature of bank and Government debt

People in the UK who pushed house prices higher and higher

But yes, you continue to point the finger at the Greeks as somehow different to the rest of us.

You are listing things that contributed to the global credit crunch.

Do you realize that Greece is not bankrupt because of American subprime borrowers?

No, you're right, these situations need humanitarian aid.....sort it out Mr Cameron!. In 2012 the world shouldn't be in this state!.

Especially re your comment on ratings agencies - How were they supposed to report on Greece's true situation (=bankruptcy) when the country lied and published totally fictitious figures? Do you think they have the authority to raid a sovereign country's government offices and check those figures?

Of course I am. It is all interlinked.

Do you actually know how ratings agencies work to make their reports credible?

Or indeed the Eurozone?

Cote - apologies for brevity of my last post, was in the middle of school run!

Anyway, getting back to the debate, I wanted to run a couple of other points past you.

Further up the thread someone points out that in their A Level economic class they knew the Euro was flawed as a currency. It was acknowledged that the terms of entry had been fudged to allow in some of the weaker economies. The ECB and the ratings agencies knew that Greek accounts were unreliable. The EU itself was unable to sign off budgets for years in a row. However at the time it was in no-one's interest to probe too deeply and upset the apple cart.

This leads on to my second point, if Greece is such an anomaly what will you say if/when Italy goes down the same route. Every charge levied against the Greeks applies equally in Italy.

babybarrister - sorry to disillusion but I'm arguing the opposite point!! You want to speak to my friend Cote ...

Ratings agencies certainly all in bed with banks as paid by them and not independent, but to be fair to ratings agencies, they have never said that they were independent ....( and no, I have no connection with any ratings agencies!!!)

One of my close friends works for a ratings agency. His stories of bastard bankers and the havoc they cause are most alarming. Chief among them, the misuse of ratings supplied for one, distinct and limited purpose and larded with heavy caveats (such as the fact the information used to arrive at them comes from the very bank itself) for other wider purposes such as creating a market in the financial product being rated.

Oh, and how when the scandal hit the big bosses who make their lives hell demanding they keep clients happy with scant regard for accuracy came over and picked out lots of scapegoats to sack.

babyb - what you're saying though is that a situation was created which positively encouraged the Greeks (and other poorer countries such as the Irish) to act in an irresponsible manner.

If someone offered you a Merc and to retire at 45 would you insist on keeping a clapped out banger and struggling on until you dropped? When you had seen the previous generation having to do exactly that. No I think you'd think blimey things have changed for the better and not ask too many questions.

My only point through all this has been that the Greeks are a) not completely responsible for their economic situation and b) claiming they are an anomaly and thus thinking what happened there couldn't happen elsewhere is extremely short-sighted.

The EU are as complicit as Greece in cooking the books to let them in. The political will overrode the fiscal reality and it was allowed to do so. I thought there'd been some whistle blowing within Eurostat but I may be wrong.

I know I keep banging on about derivatives and the underlying accounting methods and lack of transparency in the whole process but at the heart of how Greece managed to cook its books is the massive swaps deal Greece did with Goldman Sachs in 2001.

"Under Eurostat accounting rules, nations were permitted until 2008 to use so-called off-market rates in swaps to manage their debt. Greek officials, including Sardelis, say they learned that other EU countries such as Italy had employed similar methods to shrink their debts, taking advantage of the secrecy of over-the-counter derivatives compared with swaps traded on exchanges." Bloomberg link here

I'd wager Italy and Spain effected similar deals using derivatives to mask what were essentially huge loans that investment banks such as Goldman Sachs (then made huge immediate profit in fees - goes back to my point that the bankers involved in these deals receive their bonuses based on future predicted earnings) on to reduce their GDP to debt ratio.

That's why I feel that even where we can point the finger at individual countries economies and say well we're not like that (and each economy will have its own aggravating features which exacerbate their situation so we can smugly say oh well look at us increasing our pension age, it couldn't happen to us, or look at how diverse our economy is it couldn't happen to us), certain financial practices are at the rotten core of all of this and I think we will discover that a number of EU entrants did similar deals and Eurostat either was unable to unravel what was going on at the time or did not have the political will to do so.

As for stress testing - stress testing can't predict market conditions such as the effect of September 2011 on the bond markets which impacted on Greece's ability to repay GS so it's a bit like testing the safety of a car on a road going at the legal speed limit when the scenario that actually takes place is a drunk in charge of a juggernaut careering across the motorway barrier. Increasing the number of passenger airbags means f.a. in this context - or indeed in the case of a a tragedy on the scale of 9/11.

Do you mean 11th Sept 2001 rather than September 2011?

The stress tests don't assume legal speed limit scenario because that wouldn't be a stress test. The whole point of a stress test is to see if you can withstand a number of adverse factors hitting you at the same time
stress-test.eba.europa.eu/pdf/EBA_ST_2011_Summary_Report_v6.pdf

www.fsa.gov.uk/about/what/international/stress_testing