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To add to the other Greece Breaking News story (Greece Defaults, Still Wants Bailout)....
The Ars Writes:
Thom Feeney, a London shoe shop worker who started a campaign to raise €1.6 billion (that's US $1.78 billion). Feeney's IndieGoGo campaign, started just two days ago, has already raised an astonishing €478,575 (or $533,010) from more than 30,000 people.
"All this dithering over Greece is getting boring," Feeney wrote on his IndieGoGo page. "Why don't we the people just sort it instead?" He added that to come up with the €1.6 billion, every member of Europe would only have to give €3 each (well, technically you'd only need to collect from members of the European Union; that's not even counting any potentially generous Swiss or Norwegian people.)
The campaign has six days left to raise money. If €1.6 billion isn't raised, all the donors will get back their money.
This afternoon, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) declared that Greece was officially in arrears, but it has not yet declared that Greece is in default. Technically, the IMF could offer Greece an extension of its debt repayment obligation. On July 5, the country will hold a national referendum on whether to sign a deal demanding even stricter austerity from the nation.
But, if Europeans all chip in, maybe we can just put this silly bailout business behind us.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday July 02 2015, @04:34PM
Prior to the crisis, Greece was spending less of their GDP on social welfare than either France or Germany [ft.com], the same countries that are currently berating the Greeks for being profligate social spenders.
What's particularly dumb about all of this is that Greece was prepared to make loan payments that were going to chip down the national debt very slowly, but the problem was that Germany in particular was unwilling to accept their rate of repayment. To use a car loan analogy: Let's say you borrowed $12,000 to buy a car at 5% interest over 3 years, in 36 monthly installments of $350. You contract a severe illness, and you find yourself so strapped for cash that you can only come up with $315. Now, the $315 is enough to pay back the loan with more interest in 42 months, but the bank decides that instead of accepting your $315 and negotiating terms you can actually manage, they will instead refuse to accept your partial payment and will repossess your car. And now you can't get to work to do the job that convinced the bank you could afford the loan in the first place, and so your credit is in shambles and the bank didn't get their money back. And the bank is saying you are solely responsible for this when they could have accepted the $315 a month, tacked on some extra interest on the end, and eventually gotten their $12,000 back.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.