On 2015-09-03 02:12, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 09:17:56AM +1000, Peter Ross wrote:

Playing a devils advocate;-) Having decades of unbalanced cash flow is
not healthy either. If I have to borrow _more_ money every year, I
will come into trouble, sooner or later.

Greece is an example for it, at one point the lender is not willing to
risk more if he fears that his money will never return.

(BTW: That is a risk for the lender.. he makes money by taking the
risk so I do not think he needs my compassion if it does not work out
once in a while)

a little known fact about the greek crisis is that greece has actually
paid back over a trillion dollars servicing that debt. the creditor
nations have well and truly got their money back several times over so
could easily afford to forgive the debt without asset-stripping the
nation and impoverishing the greek people.

Do you have a source for that trillion? I've been following the crisis fairly closely and haven't seen anything like those figures.

Debt forgiveness for Greece entails transferring their austerity to the other nations in the €-zone, some of which are poorer than Greece.

instead, most of the "bailouts" go back to the creditors as debt
installment payments,
Well, that's what it's for.

 plus they inflict austerity measures on greece
forcing them to destroy public services, and privatise utilties and
tourism assets.

What they're mainly doing is forcing them to implement the reforms they agreed to in the previous two MoAs, but never carried out. "Austerity" in Greece today means "living within your means". The only alternative to austerity is to keep borrowing, but no-one will lend to Greece so austerity is inevitable; it's not "inflicted" by anyone.

Successive Greek governments cooked the books to get into the Euro, then kept cooking to borrow at unsustainable levels. The "Troika" have certainly made blunders but they didn't cause the crisis; Greece did that all by itself.

The private banks took a 50% haircut (a huge debt forgiveness) and the balance of the debt was taken over by the EU (& IMF to a lesser extent) at incredibly generous rates and with maturity pushed out decades (also in effect a debt forgiveness).

Greece as an innocent victim of evil bankers is a myth; they did it to themselves through corruption, clientelism and endemic tax avoidance.

[SNIP ... not up to date on the state of AU]

Anders