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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 02 2015, @01:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-pay-you-back-this-time-we-swear dept.

Greece missed a payment to the IMF on Tuesday and defaulted, but now they are willing to do the deal, or most of the deal, that would have prevented it. According to CNN:

Whoa! The Greek government is now ready to sign on to a bailout package it threw out just days ago, but the about-face won't fix the country's crisis any time soon.

Additional coverage of the Greek Referendum and the political backlash in the Eurozone can be found from the BBC.

It looks like they want to add amendments, so this is not a done deal. Maybe it's not too late for Greece? Or is the Euro better off without Greece? Or Greece without the Euro?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mendax on Thursday July 02 2015, @06:34AM

    by mendax (2840) on Thursday July 02 2015, @06:34AM (#204119)

    What's happening to Greece is definitely a tragedy, perhaps on par with one of Sophocles' plays. Greece should never have been permitted to enter the Euro zone in the first place, but it happened because the Greek government lied about the state of its finances. But it was, the government continued with the same policies that caused the drachma to inflate before the adoption of the euro, and now the chickens have come home to roost. Governments can't adopt an inflationary fiscal policy when you can't print the money to pay the bills as is the case of the euro.

    There is a reason why the governments of El Salvador, Panama, and Ecuador use the U.S. dollar instead of their own national currency. It keeps their governments fiscally honest and, therefore, they operate within their means. Zimbabwe, which formerly had the worst hyperinflation the world had ever seen, has dumped its own dollar in favor of convertible hard currency. The government itself uses the U.S. dollar for all its transactions. The result has been a stabilization of its economy. As I see it, the Greeks can do one of two things: it can dump the euro, start printing drachmas again and maintain the same fiscal policies; or it can keep the euro but drop out of the euro zone, default on its debts if they cannot be restructured, and start to do what they should have been doing all along in order to become creditworthy again. But as far as its membership in the euro zone goes, the Greeks are going to be out of it in the foreseeable future until the government there gets its act together-- after the current idiot/prime minister resigns.

    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2015, @10:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2015, @10:08AM (#204155)

    it happened because the Greek government lied about the state of its finances

    … and everybody knew it and let it go.