because the banks sucked up al the liquidity and kept it for themselves - they essentially avoided another great depression by giving the banks a shed load of public money. Works in the short term but in the long term we are more screwed.
Greece Elections
- Thread starter sityeuropa
- Start date
because the banks sucked up al the liquidity and kept it for themselves - they essentially avoided another great depression by giving the banks a shed load of public money. Works in the short term but in the long term we are more screwed.
Probably relieved that he's not got to bluff anymore and that his poker game is finally over.
Associate
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Good time to buy euros or better to wait until July?
Banks to remain shut all week, with cash withdrawals limited to €60 a day...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33307263
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33307263
Clever politics.
The country is going to hell, we already know this.
If the Government just decide to default and pull out the Euro, the people of Greece will be up in arms due the country going down the pan.
Now having a referendum over whether to default or not puts it in the hands of ordinary people. They are hoping the Greek people will vote to default and go back to the drachma, which would make sense.
Only difference is that the country will still go down the pan but might have a chance of recovery in the long run. However, whilst it is going down the pan the Greek citizens can't blame the Government, because it is what the citizens have voted in...
It will be very interesting if the referendum turns out a result of 'stay in the Euro, pay the debt'...
Soldato
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We haven't printed money to pay off our debt though. We've printed money too keep interest rates low, at a time when few people wanted to lend money.
QE is reversible, and will need to be reversed as inflation creeps up again. The "pritned" money was used to buy assets which currently sit on the books of the BoE. The reverse process will involve the BoE selling off these assets, removing money from the economy, which will then be destroyed.
Printing money to pay down Greek debts is a very different beast.
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It's talking rubbish, that doesn't work, Germany tried it many moons ago and because money is worth less the more the is of it they ended up in a situation where they were taking their wages home in wheelbarrows and burning it because it was more cost effective than using it to buy coal/wood.
They are just a bottomless pit for money, something is just so wrong that a country of only 11m that they can get so far in debt. Thye should be allowed to sink and then maybe they will sort their **** out.
Soldato
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There are still bonds owed to banks that weren’t written off back in 2012, if Greece changes currency I just imagine the hair cut banks are going to suffer which means the rest of us will have to pick up the tab via higher mortgage rates. If you have variable mortgage with RBS it would have gone up back in 2012 as RBS had to write off large quantities of debt owed to it as a part of the bailout deal so effectively British household owners are paying for Greek debt. This tends to be forgotten by many.
They can print it if they wanted to. Greek debit in terms of overall EU GDP isn't that great and the impact of inflation wouldn't be great IMO especially when you consider it how spread out it would be.
They can print it if they wanted to. Greek debit in terms of overall EU GDP isn't that great and the impact of inflation wouldn't be great IMO especially when you consider it how spread out it would be.
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As said the above it's the Prime Minister trying to avoid his responsibility by passing the buck. The guy is such a used car salesman, came into the job on the easy anti-austerity ticket with no doubt an arrogance that Greece's creditors would back down for stabilitys sake but now that they havn't he has **** himself and is trying to wash his hands, cretin.
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Soldato
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Consider all those loans and EU money has all gone to help Greece build up its infrastructure they will still be able to enjoy all the benefits of those capital projects that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford and not have to worry about paying back its lenders.
Funnily enough though, even with all the problems they have, it seems the majority (2/3 with the latest poll) of Greeks do still want to keep the Euro.
It was said they see going back to the Drachma as a sign of failure and being relegated from the '1st division'
Good explanation, cheers
Soldato
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It is about whether they accept the massive austerity of the Troika and face years of recession, massive unemployment, civil disorder and the potential of the usual Greek solution ... military takeover or they reject the Troika and get out the Euro and face years of pain with their own currency, massive unemployment, civil disorder and ..............
The ordinary people of Greece, like the citizens of most countries are fkd either way having to bail out the mess created by politicians.
Which is very true. They are a very proud country. Adopting the Euro was a big step for them, especially after everything they went through in recent history.
Best article I have read so far for anyone who wants to gain a little more understanding:
When I was a youngster in the 1950s, the same Monday morning ritual was repeated in working-class households like mine across the land. Once the father had gone to work, the mother would drag the boiler from under the sink, fill it with water and in would go the dirty laundry. An hour later it was taken out and rinsed and either squeezed by hand or run through the mangle. Then, weather permitting, it was pegged out or, if the weather did not permit, draped around the house until the rain stopped. An immensely laborious process in homes where most mothers struggled to cope with all the other household jobs.
And what, you may ask, has this to do with Greece? Quite a lot, as it happens.
My parents and millions more like them could have bought a washing machine — one of the many labour-saving gadgets that were beginning to liberate women from the drudgery that often made their lives a misery.
They were poor, but hire purchase had arrived. The washing machines or the vacuum cleaners or the fridges could have gone on the never-never. Instead people like my parents waited until they had saved enough money — even if it took years.
Shocking? On one level, of course. My mother was a clever woman who never read a book because there was no time with five children and all that work to do. But years later, when I asked her why she had wasted so much of her life in unnecessary drudgery, she made no complaint.
“That’s how we were brought up,” she would say. “Borrowing was wrong. If you didn’t have the money, you didn’t buy it and that was that.” Until the day she died she regarded credit cards as the work of Satan and she was not alone.
Which takes us to Greece at the turn of the century — a country in many ways not unlike Britain in the 1950s. Everything was pretty run-down. They didn’t really have a word for consumerism. If you wanted a phone installed at home you could expect to wait several months. And credit cards were almost unheard of. The older generation would have no truck with debt.
The house in the Peloponnese built by Humphrys and his son once echoed to the sound of bouzoukis; now they are silent
This all changed at midnight on December 31, 1998. The euro was born and Greece later became a part of it and all hell broke lose. It was like pushing a rusty old car to the top of a steep hill, fitting it with turbochargers and roaring down the hill at a speed Jeremy Clarkson would have envied and then — too late — realising the brakes didn’t work.
Britain had taken a generation or two to learn how to deal with the new world of credit. The Greeks tried to adapt to it overnight and, predictably, they failed.
The immediate and most obvious effect of the euro was that prices shot up. I have been going there regularly since my oldest son Christopher moved to Athens in 1992 and our regular boozy dinners suddenly cost at least twice as much.
That was predictable and hardly an existential crisis. On a different scale altogether was what the government was doing. As the whole world now knows, it was borrowing and spending at an almost unimaginable rate.
Let’s be clear about one thing. What has happened to Greece is not the fault of its people: it is the fault of its politicians. And its oligarchs. Greeks believe it is hard to separate the two classes and they hold them equally in contempt. It is not hard to see why.
The very rich have been able to grow even richer for at least two reasons. One: they did not pay their taxes and the politicians allowed them to get away with it. Two: many big businesses creamed vast profits from the contracts the politicians were handing out as though they were distributing flyers outside an Underground station — except that they expected something in return.
Every Greek knows of at least one government minister who has bought a magnificent house after about five minutes in the job. And every Greek can see for himself the rich men’s yachts in the harbours and the Michelin-starred restaurants where you might have to wait three months to book a table.
It’s true that the ordinary cafes seem pretty full too. But if you look a little more closely you will see that very few customers have meals in front of them. Instead they have a coffee — which they might manage to make last for an hour or two. Sometimes a couple will share one cup — even though the desperate cafe owners have cut the price by half.
This may seem a trivial inconvenience, but meeting friends in a cafe is an important element in the fabric of the Greek way of life that is being torn apart. Two things above all bind Greek society together and have done for centuries. One obviously is the family. The other is friendships that may last a lifetime, which is where something called the “parea” comes in.
Most Greeks have their own parea: a small group of friends — half a dozen or more — who might have met at school or university or in their first job. They socialise as a group. If a young Greek goes into a bar in Athens the barman might very well ask if she is joining her parea and will look a little askance if she is on her own. The parea matters.
My son has a friend who is that rare exception — a reasonably well-off young Greek who has managed to hold on to his job. What he is losing is his parea. He is the only one of them in work and thus the only one who can afford to go out for the evening. But his friends are far too proud to let him pay for the drinks and so he has become effectively isolated from them.
Why don’t they meet at each others’ homes? Because they live with their parents. Their chances of buying the most modest apartment are nil and those who were renting can no longer afford the rent. Nor can they afford to get married and move in together.
Natasha, 27, told me: “If we want to have sex we check into a hotel for an hour or two or we use the car. Some of my friends can’t even afford condoms and there has been an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.”
I don’t need to check the statistics to know what is happening on the marriage front. Ten years ago Christopher and I built a house in a bay in the Peloponnese, which was wonderful except on Friday and Saturday nights from May to October. Every other newlywed couple in the district had their wedding-night parties there and the sound of the bouzoukis carried across the water. It was great for partying but lousy for sleeping. Now it is silent.
And those who do marry are nervous about having children. A friend told me of someone she knows who had been desperate for years to have a baby and finally, after an expensive course of IVF treatment, became pregnant. When her doctor confirmed it she asked him for an abortion. He was aghast, but she and her husband had lost their jobs by then and could no longer afford a child.
Here’s something else that eats away at so many of the people I speak to in Greece: the knowledge that we, in the richer countries of Europe, blame them for what is happening. Brought it on themselves, didn’t they? Serves ’em right, don’t it?
Well, actually, no, they didn’t and it doesn’t.
Bunch of skivers aren’t they? Work for a few years, retire at 50 on massive pensions and expect us to pick up the bills. No. No. No.
Let’s take the young men and women who don’t work. Almost 60% of Greeks under the age of 25 have no job and no prospects of getting one. Austerity hit the country just as they were beginning to leave school or university or finishing their mandatory military service, so it’s a little hard to see how they can be held responsible for the collapse of the Greek economy.
If not them, let’s blame their parents shall we? It’s certainly true that their lives were easier and pensions were absurdly generous for many who worked in the massively bloated public sector.
My son has a friend who was in her late thirties when he first met her. Unusually for her age group she was still single even though she rather wanted to get married. What was putting her off was that if she did, she would lose her pension or — more accurately — her father’s pension. When he died it had passed to her as an unmarried dependant. Absurd but not uncommon.
And, yes, it’s true that many Greeks have been able to get their pensions from the age of 50, but their salaries were relatively small. And I wonder how many people in this country would refuse to take an early pension if it were on offer from an overly generous state.
The fact is that the two political parties that held power from the collapse of the military junta in 1974 until this crisis overwhelmed them simply bribed the electorate and kept upping the ante. And, yes, the Greek people took what they offered with no questions asked — which is hardly surprising in light of Greece’s history.
It’s easy to forget that Greece may have bequeathed the great gift of democracy to the western world a couple of millennia ago but in recent history its people have enjoyed the fruits of that democracy for a vanishingly short period.
This is a country that has been through several kinds of hell in living memory. An unspeakably savage Nazi occupation. A civil war that tore the country apart. A brutal military dictatorship. Is it surprising that people who lived through that, or whose parents suffered under the worst of it, were perfectly happy to take what the state offered them without asking too many questions?
But the price of an acquiescent electorate was appalling corruption on just about every level. When I was in Greece a few months ago I met a delightful couple, Vangelis and Mika Geroyianni, who once owned a successful car dealership. They were visited regularly by tax inspectors, as were almost all successful, privately owned businesses — though not, of course, the seriously big boys. They did their deals at a different level.
Vangelis told me that since the financial crash happened their visitors had stopped coming. I asked him why. Because, he said, his business was on the brink of going bust and was no longer making money. Therefore the inspectors had no reason to call. As he said, there’s no point in blackmailing people who cannot pay up, is there?
In the “good” old days there would often have been three inspectors: the hard man, the soft man and the boss. There was nothing subtle about it. If their demands were met, the Geroyiannis would hear no more from the tax office. If they were not, they could expect serious difficulties with their next set of accounts. Very serious difficulties. As the boss man would say: the tax rules are complicated and there are many grey areas.
“So you’d have to hand over a brown envelope with cash in it?” I asked Mika.
“No,” she said, “not an envelope . . . a plastic bag. It wasn’t hundreds of euros, it was thousands.”
When I told a government minister later about our conversation he did not even try to deny such things happened, merely nodded sorrowfully and pointed out that corruption was as old as Greece. What could you do, eh?
The Geroyiannis are still — just about — clinging on to their business, but they have had to sell their comfortable house and move into a flat. They have sacked almost all their employees and instead of a thriving car dealership all that is left is a small repair shop. But now there is a new government and, as I write, it is not only their little business and tens of thousands more like it joining the massive list of bankrupt enterprises, it is the country itself.
In the years that I have been reporting on this crisis there has been one constant. Overwhelmingly, the people of Greece have been determined to stay in the euro. That determination was based on more than purely economic factors: it was pride. The euro in their wallets was proof that they had left their troubled past behind them and had finally moved from Third to First World. They were in the front rank of European nations.
The opinion polls tell us they are as determined as ever to keep the euro. But I wonder. Every time I return to Greece I sense a changing mood — at least among the educated middle class. Where once they told me: “We have no choice if we are ever to recover,” they now ask me: “How can we ever recover if they keep telling us to cut and cut and tax and tax?” And it is a hard question to answer.
It is especially hard when one of the demands Greece’s creditors make is to increase the very tax — VAT — that would almost certainly have the effect of deterring foreign tourists. If anything can rescue the Greek economy in the medium term it must surely be tourism.
But it is the cuts that arouse the real passion — especially more cuts to pensions. Those pensions that once provided their parents and grandparents with a very comfortable old age have mostly been chopped by at least 40%. That might just be tolerable, but now it is no longer one elderly couple relying on them. Often it is their children and grandchildren too. How do you tell these people they must take another bite out of income that is barely feeding them and their children?
And, yes, some Greek people are going hungry. Where once it was young migrants rummaging in the waste bins in the street outside my son’s apartment, it is now more likely to be Greeks. Sometimes old men. There is almost unbearable pathos in watching a stiff-backed old man in his best suit and white moustache rummaging in a bin. Or the old lady on the corner shielding her face with one hand as she begs with the other.
How do you tell these people that they must make sacrifices to pay back debts that were built up by politicians on the make or investment bankers who gave the green light to entering the euro when every economic indicator was flashing bright red?
And what, you may ask, has this to do with Greece? Quite a lot, as it happens.
My parents and millions more like them could have bought a washing machine — one of the many labour-saving gadgets that were beginning to liberate women from the drudgery that often made their lives a misery.
They were poor, but hire purchase had arrived. The washing machines or the vacuum cleaners or the fridges could have gone on the never-never. Instead people like my parents waited until they had saved enough money — even if it took years.
Shocking? On one level, of course. My mother was a clever woman who never read a book because there was no time with five children and all that work to do. But years later, when I asked her why she had wasted so much of her life in unnecessary drudgery, she made no complaint.
“That’s how we were brought up,” she would say. “Borrowing was wrong. If you didn’t have the money, you didn’t buy it and that was that.” Until the day she died she regarded credit cards as the work of Satan and she was not alone.
Which takes us to Greece at the turn of the century — a country in many ways not unlike Britain in the 1950s. Everything was pretty run-down. They didn’t really have a word for consumerism. If you wanted a phone installed at home you could expect to wait several months. And credit cards were almost unheard of. The older generation would have no truck with debt.
The house in the Peloponnese built by Humphrys and his son once echoed to the sound of bouzoukis; now they are silent
This all changed at midnight on December 31, 1998. The euro was born and Greece later became a part of it and all hell broke lose. It was like pushing a rusty old car to the top of a steep hill, fitting it with turbochargers and roaring down the hill at a speed Jeremy Clarkson would have envied and then — too late — realising the brakes didn’t work.
Britain had taken a generation or two to learn how to deal with the new world of credit. The Greeks tried to adapt to it overnight and, predictably, they failed.
The immediate and most obvious effect of the euro was that prices shot up. I have been going there regularly since my oldest son Christopher moved to Athens in 1992 and our regular boozy dinners suddenly cost at least twice as much.
That was predictable and hardly an existential crisis. On a different scale altogether was what the government was doing. As the whole world now knows, it was borrowing and spending at an almost unimaginable rate.
Let’s be clear about one thing. What has happened to Greece is not the fault of its people: it is the fault of its politicians. And its oligarchs. Greeks believe it is hard to separate the two classes and they hold them equally in contempt. It is not hard to see why.
The very rich have been able to grow even richer for at least two reasons. One: they did not pay their taxes and the politicians allowed them to get away with it. Two: many big businesses creamed vast profits from the contracts the politicians were handing out as though they were distributing flyers outside an Underground station — except that they expected something in return.
Every Greek knows of at least one government minister who has bought a magnificent house after about five minutes in the job. And every Greek can see for himself the rich men’s yachts in the harbours and the Michelin-starred restaurants where you might have to wait three months to book a table.
It’s true that the ordinary cafes seem pretty full too. But if you look a little more closely you will see that very few customers have meals in front of them. Instead they have a coffee — which they might manage to make last for an hour or two. Sometimes a couple will share one cup — even though the desperate cafe owners have cut the price by half.
This may seem a trivial inconvenience, but meeting friends in a cafe is an important element in the fabric of the Greek way of life that is being torn apart. Two things above all bind Greek society together and have done for centuries. One obviously is the family. The other is friendships that may last a lifetime, which is where something called the “parea” comes in.
Most Greeks have their own parea: a small group of friends — half a dozen or more — who might have met at school or university or in their first job. They socialise as a group. If a young Greek goes into a bar in Athens the barman might very well ask if she is joining her parea and will look a little askance if she is on her own. The parea matters.
My son has a friend who is that rare exception — a reasonably well-off young Greek who has managed to hold on to his job. What he is losing is his parea. He is the only one of them in work and thus the only one who can afford to go out for the evening. But his friends are far too proud to let him pay for the drinks and so he has become effectively isolated from them.
Why don’t they meet at each others’ homes? Because they live with their parents. Their chances of buying the most modest apartment are nil and those who were renting can no longer afford the rent. Nor can they afford to get married and move in together.
Natasha, 27, told me: “If we want to have sex we check into a hotel for an hour or two or we use the car. Some of my friends can’t even afford condoms and there has been an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.”
I don’t need to check the statistics to know what is happening on the marriage front. Ten years ago Christopher and I built a house in a bay in the Peloponnese, which was wonderful except on Friday and Saturday nights from May to October. Every other newlywed couple in the district had their wedding-night parties there and the sound of the bouzoukis carried across the water. It was great for partying but lousy for sleeping. Now it is silent.
And those who do marry are nervous about having children. A friend told me of someone she knows who had been desperate for years to have a baby and finally, after an expensive course of IVF treatment, became pregnant. When her doctor confirmed it she asked him for an abortion. He was aghast, but she and her husband had lost their jobs by then and could no longer afford a child.
Here’s something else that eats away at so many of the people I speak to in Greece: the knowledge that we, in the richer countries of Europe, blame them for what is happening. Brought it on themselves, didn’t they? Serves ’em right, don’t it?
Well, actually, no, they didn’t and it doesn’t.
Bunch of skivers aren’t they? Work for a few years, retire at 50 on massive pensions and expect us to pick up the bills. No. No. No.
Let’s take the young men and women who don’t work. Almost 60% of Greeks under the age of 25 have no job and no prospects of getting one. Austerity hit the country just as they were beginning to leave school or university or finishing their mandatory military service, so it’s a little hard to see how they can be held responsible for the collapse of the Greek economy.
If not them, let’s blame their parents shall we? It’s certainly true that their lives were easier and pensions were absurdly generous for many who worked in the massively bloated public sector.
My son has a friend who was in her late thirties when he first met her. Unusually for her age group she was still single even though she rather wanted to get married. What was putting her off was that if she did, she would lose her pension or — more accurately — her father’s pension. When he died it had passed to her as an unmarried dependant. Absurd but not uncommon.
And, yes, it’s true that many Greeks have been able to get their pensions from the age of 50, but their salaries were relatively small. And I wonder how many people in this country would refuse to take an early pension if it were on offer from an overly generous state.
The fact is that the two political parties that held power from the collapse of the military junta in 1974 until this crisis overwhelmed them simply bribed the electorate and kept upping the ante. And, yes, the Greek people took what they offered with no questions asked — which is hardly surprising in light of Greece’s history.
It’s easy to forget that Greece may have bequeathed the great gift of democracy to the western world a couple of millennia ago but in recent history its people have enjoyed the fruits of that democracy for a vanishingly short period.
This is a country that has been through several kinds of hell in living memory. An unspeakably savage Nazi occupation. A civil war that tore the country apart. A brutal military dictatorship. Is it surprising that people who lived through that, or whose parents suffered under the worst of it, were perfectly happy to take what the state offered them without asking too many questions?
But the price of an acquiescent electorate was appalling corruption on just about every level. When I was in Greece a few months ago I met a delightful couple, Vangelis and Mika Geroyianni, who once owned a successful car dealership. They were visited regularly by tax inspectors, as were almost all successful, privately owned businesses — though not, of course, the seriously big boys. They did their deals at a different level.
Vangelis told me that since the financial crash happened their visitors had stopped coming. I asked him why. Because, he said, his business was on the brink of going bust and was no longer making money. Therefore the inspectors had no reason to call. As he said, there’s no point in blackmailing people who cannot pay up, is there?
In the “good” old days there would often have been three inspectors: the hard man, the soft man and the boss. There was nothing subtle about it. If their demands were met, the Geroyiannis would hear no more from the tax office. If they were not, they could expect serious difficulties with their next set of accounts. Very serious difficulties. As the boss man would say: the tax rules are complicated and there are many grey areas.
“So you’d have to hand over a brown envelope with cash in it?” I asked Mika.
“No,” she said, “not an envelope . . . a plastic bag. It wasn’t hundreds of euros, it was thousands.”
When I told a government minister later about our conversation he did not even try to deny such things happened, merely nodded sorrowfully and pointed out that corruption was as old as Greece. What could you do, eh?
The Geroyiannis are still — just about — clinging on to their business, but they have had to sell their comfortable house and move into a flat. They have sacked almost all their employees and instead of a thriving car dealership all that is left is a small repair shop. But now there is a new government and, as I write, it is not only their little business and tens of thousands more like it joining the massive list of bankrupt enterprises, it is the country itself.
In the years that I have been reporting on this crisis there has been one constant. Overwhelmingly, the people of Greece have been determined to stay in the euro. That determination was based on more than purely economic factors: it was pride. The euro in their wallets was proof that they had left their troubled past behind them and had finally moved from Third to First World. They were in the front rank of European nations.
The opinion polls tell us they are as determined as ever to keep the euro. But I wonder. Every time I return to Greece I sense a changing mood — at least among the educated middle class. Where once they told me: “We have no choice if we are ever to recover,” they now ask me: “How can we ever recover if they keep telling us to cut and cut and tax and tax?” And it is a hard question to answer.
It is especially hard when one of the demands Greece’s creditors make is to increase the very tax — VAT — that would almost certainly have the effect of deterring foreign tourists. If anything can rescue the Greek economy in the medium term it must surely be tourism.
But it is the cuts that arouse the real passion — especially more cuts to pensions. Those pensions that once provided their parents and grandparents with a very comfortable old age have mostly been chopped by at least 40%. That might just be tolerable, but now it is no longer one elderly couple relying on them. Often it is their children and grandchildren too. How do you tell these people they must take another bite out of income that is barely feeding them and their children?
And, yes, some Greek people are going hungry. Where once it was young migrants rummaging in the waste bins in the street outside my son’s apartment, it is now more likely to be Greeks. Sometimes old men. There is almost unbearable pathos in watching a stiff-backed old man in his best suit and white moustache rummaging in a bin. Or the old lady on the corner shielding her face with one hand as she begs with the other.
How do you tell these people that they must make sacrifices to pay back debts that were built up by politicians on the make or investment bankers who gave the green light to entering the euro when every economic indicator was flashing bright red?
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Of course they do as standing on their own feet would expose what a sham of a country Greece is.
Soldato
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- Peoples Republic of Histonia, Cambridge
They can print money to pay of debt, but where do you draw the line? Should Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland also be excused of their debt commitments. Maybe France can stop paying tax for a couple of years, all courtesy of the ECB printing press.
Much of economic stability and prosperity comes down to confidence and trust. Even though the sums for Greece are relatively small, the symbolic act would be highly damaging to the rest of Europe. If central banks start printing money as way of solving their economic problems, markets will turn on them. I sure wouldn't be investing my money.
Letting Greece off by printing also doesn't really solve any problems for the rest of Europe either. Why would Germany and France, who are owed the lions share of the debt, want to print money to pay themselves, and in the process sacrificial the cornerstone of the fiscal discipline which has seen their economy's become successful, and the envy of countries like Greece
If Germany and France wished to print their way to prosperity, they would have started doing it years ago. They don't need any help from Greece.
Greece was bluffing. They wouldn't have taken the money, and if they had they'd be out of the EU faster that you can smash a cheap plate at a wedding. The Russians would be buying nothing but problems.
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Soldato
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- 14 Aug 2008
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- 4,258
- Location
- North Sea
Considering Russia's been suffering under sanctions this past year- eighteen months or so, it's economy contracting and it's government bonds downgraded to junk, would Moscow even have that money to give to Greece in the first place?
Never underestimate how deeply Russia is willing to slit it's own throat in order to look "big". I.E the reason they spent most of the 1990's destitute was because they absorbed all USSR debt in order to inherit the USSR's seats on the UN and important councils, plus overseas bases/etc.