The Euro Crisis

[MC Prussian]

This has got to be the press picture of the year 2010:

It represents everything that is going wrong with the EU at the moment.

Wonder if they'll ever find out of this mess or whether they'll have to scrap the Euro altogether and bring back their national currencies.

I remember pretty vividly about ten, fifteen years ago when our teachers at secondary/high school were so encouraging about joining the Union and emphatic about the construct as a whole.

Yes, looking back at that initial euphoria, a European Union's a great idea on paper and I still regard it very highly as a noble goal - yet the bureaucrats reigning in Brussels are anything but doing their job.

It's a money-consuming machinery and moloch that has so far prevented any decent progress from happening.

They rather garner the taxpayer's money into their own pockets than spending it wisely.

And the issues in Greece will soon have Portugal, Italy, Spain and even Ireland crumbling. Se Germans are unhappy about having to pay millions and millions again, just because the "Southeners" messed up.

What's your take on the current EU crisis? Are the English happy you didn't partake in the early frenzy and that you still got yer pounds (just like us Swiss still got the Franc)?

[shen]

The Danes are very much blowing their horn now for sure

[FoxyPV]

Most civil servants reasoned that with average monthly salaries being no more than €1,000, the cushiness of state posts also allowed them to hold second jobs (policemen working for security firms, tax inspectors working as accountants, department heads running boutiques) which they invariably never declared. Such jobs account for Greece's huge black economy conservatively estimated at over 30 percent.

"The Greeks have a love-hate relationship with the state," adds Dimou. "On the one hand they regard the state as a protector, seeing it as the only institution that will give them security and on the other they feel oppressed by it and think nothing of stealing from it."

The abundance of perks, benefits and bonuses that pushed profligacy to its limits was nurtured by runaway bureaucracy that gave way to loopholes and abuse. It was a system in which phony invoices and receipts thrived next to phantom committees and working groups that never met. The environment ministry, alone, was discovered to have 31 such organisations, including a committee for a lake that had ceased to exist back in the 1930s when it dried up.When Papaconstantinou took over the finance ministry he found staff telephone bills that ran into the thousands, monthly newspaper bills of 25,000 euro and ministers claiming 18,000 euro curtain bills for their offices.

Arcane legislation for special interest groups, including the armed forces and those who held hazardous jobs, meant that pensions could be had as early as 45. The daughters of deceased army officers could claim their father's pension for a lifetime if they remained unmarried; a hairdresser working with "dangerous" chemicals could receive pensions by the age of 50; a policeman on the beat could leave his job all expenses paid at the age of 45.

Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/07/greek-debt-crisis-jobs

There has been plenty of swindling by successive govts and the Olympics too but this is a bit much. The Germans must be fooking raging.

[shen]

Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/07/greek-debt-crisis-jobs

There has been plenty of swindling by successive govts and the Olympics too but this is a bit much. The Germans must be fooking raging.

...Which is why I very much hoped the Eurozone would not bail out Greece. The Greeks should NEVER EVER have been allowed to have the Euro in the first place, and now the rest are paying for it. I don't have any sympathy at all for the Greeks. Every Greek I've met has exploited the system to the highest degree, without ever feeling guilt or remorse. I even worked for a Greek Cypriot here in Denmark who went on a long tirade on how easy it was to dupe the Danish police and evade taxes, emphasizing the authorities' naivety. For a split second I started to understand why right-wing politics have gained so much momentum in this country. I don't have anything against the Greeks in general, but their attitude towards the state and their lack of solidarity is despicable. I fully understand why their country has gone belly-up

[sw_fox]

The only problem with the Euro was that they let the South European countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece), that were all fascist dictatorships around 25/30 years before the introduction of the single currency. There was a dictatorship hangover, and although they embraced free market reforms and gave the illusion of booming economies, the public sector was never actually reformed effectively, and the culture of 'looking after your own' when it came to workers directly employed by the state. This is why they have such massive problems with pensions and public sector pay & benefits. On top of this, the culture in the government is still pretty secretive when it comes to official statistics (Greece is by far the worse for this, the finance ministry under their previous centre-right government was basically making up statistics to prevent their borrowing costs to run their deficit from soaring, the discovery of this by the new government created this crisis), and governments will tell the people what they want to hear, not the truth. There should have been stronger regulations in place before they were allowed to join.

Interestingly enough, the ex-communist states that are either candidates to join or are actually members of the single currency reformed their public sector very well, and have been the ones that have put Western Europe to shame when it comes to dealing with deficits and soaring public sector pay. Some would say it is because of the iron discipline and authoritarian characters of some of the governments, throw backs to communist times. I would argue that it is because they were given much more strict preconditions before they were even allowed to join the union, and then further strict conditions before joining the single currency. If these policies were followed before the Southern European nations were allowed to join then this crisis wouldnt have happened.