Greece vs IMF place your bets

[DaMan]

Greece has a €300 million payment due next week that they say they cannot pay. Looks like the bankers are scrambling to find a resolution as we speak.

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million€1.6billion, that's the bank's problem.

[Graf Zahl]

To be honest, I think the best thing is to let them crash and burn and then sort out the shockwaves rather than letting this misery go on without end.

[DaMan]

Brace yourselves default is coming.

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[Reactor]

I thought IMF is a music file format used by Commander Keen, Wolf-3D and BioMenace

Whathever will happen, this conflict further proves that politicians are all money-hungry incompetent bobos, corrupt bastards, causing nothing more than mayhem and destruction from behind their writing desk. From the perspective of the people, it's a little bit like Aliens vs. Predator - whoever wins, they will lose.

[wildweasel]

What are they even doing with the money? Because based on what I keep hearing from people who live around there, it sure as hell isn't going into welfare programs...

[Reactor]

Just the same thing everyone does when he has a little power in his hands...or better, too much power. They steal it. The same thing happens here.

[Edward-san]

This ridiculous situation would never happen if Greece never joined the eurozone.
Also, if they could leave the euro before the 'Troika' creation, it would be incredibly less painful and more politically acceptable.

These bunch of ignorant politicians never thought about it, uh. Now that the blood of Greek people has been spilled enough, obviously they're left into the hands of the creditors.

Good job, oblivious bureaucrats!

[Graf Zahl]

This ridiculous situation would never happen if Greece never joined the eurozone.

Indeed. They only got into the Eurozone by cheating and falsifying their financial reports. And it's the consequences of this act that's now causing all the problems.
And the people responsible for this mess aren't even in office anymore and will never be brought to justice. They should rot in jail.

[Gez]

This ridiculous situation would never happen if the eurozone was never created.

Fixed. The idea of creating a monetary union without having also a fiscal and budgetary union was stupid. They thought they could put the cart before the horses and sneakily move toward federalization this way, but they didn't think about how this cart would behave on a downward slope.

Also it's easy to blame the Greeks for having lied about their finances, but it's too easy to blame only them. Everybody with a smidgen of competence knew the Greek numbers were fake; it was a political decision to let them in anyway. And also, look: who's surprised by things like this?

The problem with Greece is that its economy has been completely tanked, so that there's no room for maneuvering now. To make a clumsy metaphor: Greece is undergoing heart surgery, but the doctors are not using a cardiopulmonary bypass. The replacement solution has been to just plug the blood loss with transfusion bags, but it's overall just messy and wasteful.

The eurozone has a whole is woefully unequipped to deal with crisis situations that involve massive unemployment and shrinking internal demand. People have little money, so they spend less, so local businesses don't sell enough anymore and go bankrupt, so unemployment increases, so people have even less money, so they spend even less, and so on. You can't get out of a negative feedback loop like this without using tools that are strictly forbidden or otherwise made impossible by the EU, such as currency devaluation, capital controls and import tariffs.

[Graf Zahl]

I think the biggest problem is that they never accounted for a bunch of utter morons to be elected into government who would do their best to undermine each and every effort to save their own country. I think they would have been able to solve the crisis, albeit slowly, had Greece being able to keep a competent government.

[Gez]

Greece would need to have had a competent government in the first place in order to be able to keep it. And if they had a competent government before they wouldn't have gotten into this mess. Syriza got elected in the first place precisely because the previous governments demonstrated they were corrupt and incompetent.

[demonimp]

They should just try the Golden Dawn option.

Get rid of the euro and banking system. Build the nation again as more self reliant and maybe pay some of the loan back later.

[Edward-san]

You can't get rid of the banking system. If grexit becomes reality, the government must do whatever it takes to recapitalize it (the 'drachma' money needed to do this would not be hard to find, just repress the public debt interests and print some money!), otherwise there would be a great banking paralysis.

[Edward-san]

Sorry for the bump, but it seems capital controls are on now. They should've done that from the beginning ...

[demo_the_man]

Well, my bets are on a EU/Greek war over the debt. After all if you wont pay your car loan back, they take your car. Same thing most likely for the greeks sadly. c