That's fair enough. You're not insulting anyone about it. if things get much worse in spain or portugal you'll probably see something similar. There's a lot of people there who think that things were better under franco.

Nefertiti2 wrote:


You're right about Duvalier, but not really about any of the others.

The IMF never lent to Abacha (or anyone else in Nigeria, for that matter). Actually, Nigeria's external debt is pretty small, because of its oil revenues.

The IMF provided about $2 billion in standby credit to Musharraf, nearly all of which was repaid within months; overall, Pakistani external debt as a % of GDP declined significantly under Musharraf (from about 50% to 25%).

The IMF only began lending to Somoza only about two months before his downfall - only about $20 million was disbursed before the Sandinistas took power and cancelled the loan. Nearly all the outstanding debt due in pre-Sandinista Nicaragua was either bilateral or to the IADB.

The IMF did loan a lot of money to Mobutu, under pressure from the US and France (and all the more surprisingly, since Mobutu had the local IMF rep beaten up and his wife and daughter raped for writing a report saying there was no chance this money would be repaid). However, Congo qualified for HIPC debt relief and has had a substantial portion of its debt wiped out - I *think* (it's hard to tell b/c of the way the data is organized) that the IMF has forgiven more than it lent under Mobutu.

My parents get a state pension from both Ireland and the Netherlands. Guess which one is higher.

I'm starting to understand where Ireland's 19% hole in the budget is coming from.

Nefertiti2 wrote:


I've been thinking about this since yesterday. Obviously, there's some truth to it (and lenders have accepted as much since they took the haircut).

But think about what would have happened had bankers *not* lent so much. Say that around 2006, when Greek debt was probably still manageable, bankers said "hey, you know what? These Greeks don;t know when to stop borrowing money, things are getting risky, we should really raise the interest rate to get them to cut down on borrowing." This is a good thought experiment: what would have happened?

Well, first of all, you can bet your bottom euro that everyone in Greece would have been absolutely outraged. "How dare these gnomes of Zurich treat us differently from Germany? This is a betrayal of European ideals, etc." And then they would have been forced to do a lot of what they are now doing anyway: reducing the size of the state so they weren't in a primary deficit anymore.

Obviously, the contraction wouldn't have been as severe - the extra 4 years of borrowing added a lot of needless debt, and hence has resulted in larger required cuts. But they are lager cuts from a higher base, because most of that "wasted" 4 years of extra borrowing went into consumption.

If you look at GDP/capita in Greece, it's down something like 20% since 2008 - which brings it back to about where it was in 2005 or so. Had austerity kicked in in 2006, you probably would have had a few years of negative or very slow growth - in other words, Greece would probably be *exactly* where it is today in terms of aggregate consumption, but with better prospects for the future.

As for social dislocation, Nazis and the like? I'd have thought it wouldn't be as severe, but who knows? But this implies that the important thing for social dislocation isn't one's absolute condition, but one's relative condition: that a country which grows unsustainably fast and then collapses is worse off than one which never grew at all.

My parents get a state pension from both Ireland and the Netherlands. Guess which one is higher.

I'm starting to understand where Ireland's 19% hole in the budget is coming from.

Yeah, Ahern used the old age pension to buy a lot of votes, and it's impossible to reduce it, or even means test it. They gave medical cards to everyone over seventy, and when they tried to revert to means-testing, you came as close as possible to rioting.

before the extension of the medical card, the doctor who earned the most from the medical card was in Carna. Afterwards, it was a doctor in blackrock.

gramsci's thought experiment suffers from the flaw that no-one involved in the euro was too keen to look too closely at any of the problems in any of the Euro countries, or to force people to do anything about it.

This thread sometimes seems like an argument between one set of people looking for a solution to a problem and another set of people wanting to look at the causes of the problem.

It's like going to your doctor and having him tell you have lung cancer and then having a conversation in which you repeatedly ask what the steps are to deal with the cancer while he repeatedly tells you you shouldn't have smoked so much.

I'm pretty sure we're arguing over the diagnosis.

To us the test of company law director's liability, the lenders failed to exercise the care and skill they possessed. The Greek politicians likewise. The Greek people didn't actually have a choice in this, since both the groups of people whom the system places in the process to exercise care and skill didn't do it.
And yet they're the ones who bear the brunt of this. Go figure.

NHH wrote:


Why do the Greek people continue to get some kind of pass on decades of wilful and deliberate tax evasion? Sometimes stuff really is the little guy's fault, too, and not just the ruling elite's.

But as we've already said the majority of the tax evasion was done by people higher up the chain, and public sector employees in particular, who are the ones particularly having their coffin lids nailed down by the austerity measures couldn't evade taxes.

But that's still arguing about why I got cancer in the first place.

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


And they still do the free travel national travel cards for the over 66, don't they? It's madness. My father tells me that Cork pensioners would get on the train to Dublin the morning, play a few games of cards during the journey, go to the pub in Dublin, and play cards on the train back to Cork in the evening. This would be a weekly jolly.

Ireland is like a mini-Greece I suppose. People want everything but aren't really that keen on paying tax either. And there's the same not giving a shit about everyone else attitude too. The pensioners and civil servants in Ireland really couldn't give two shits if their children, grandchildren, the poor and vulnerable are paying through the fucking nose to fund the bailout which is keeping the gravy train on the tracks. Let them emigrate if they don't like it. Same attitude as in the 1980s, nothing has changed.

The economy in Ireland is actually not too bad, and there is actually a lot of room for austerity in Ireland. But proper austerity, not the punishing of the poor and vulnerable that they currently pursue. I mean bringing the tax code and means testing of benefits in Ireland into line with with places like Holland and Germany. And these are hardly austere places where people roam the streets in rags.

The more I think about it, it would actually have been very feasible to give the markets the two fingers, close the hole in the budget and default. Morgan Kelly may have been right about that.

But the middle-class in Ireland love to turn on Joe Duffy, get passionately outraged about cuts to vulnerable people that don't really affect them. But actually cut back on the Sky Sports subscription or the two cars to help the country? Nah, they don't want to do that.

ad hoc wrote:


Fine. Let's cure the cancer. Everyone start paying their taxes, and everyone else who's blameless - but who thinks you can work for 25 years and then retire for 40 with a full government pension - smarten the fuck up.

Yeah, but this isn't cancer. One Doctor says you've got a disease for which the cure is this shiny new drug, and someone else who says the doctor is a shill for the drug company who've been feeding you a toxin that's caused in the guise of regular painkillers they've been doling you out, and if you changed surgeries entirely, you'd start to feel better immediately. Or something like that.

Why not? the ghoulish rentiers do.

NHH wrote:


So, doing what the ghoulish rentiers do is a prescription for sound fiscal health? How's that working out so far?

Just out of curiosity, who do the 'ghoulish rentiers' include?

WOM wrote:


Ah, come on. Those people aren't the problem and it's ridiculous to assert they are.

Keyzer wrote:


Those people are indeed part of the problem, and it's ridiculous to assert they aren't.

Is it time to play Greek Welfare Top Trumps again?

"They work for 25 years and retire in their 40s"
"I heard they work for 10 years and retire before they're 30".

And so on.