"How Greece was robbed by the bankers"

[alcina]

This is from last week, but I just came across it and don't see it posted elsewhere on DU. It's worth the read.

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie … Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

… the banks wrecked the Greek government, and then deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt … while revenue-generating public assets were sold off to oligarchs and international corporations. The rest of the article is about how and why.


http://www.hangthebankers.com/how-greece-was-robbed-by-the-bankers/

[99th_Monkey]

1. Bankster's dress rehearsal for The Big One?

Not out of the question me thinks.

[Hydra]

3. If that was the case, they've had thousands of fress rehersals

I think it's more that they take bigger and more outrageous bites, seeing how far they can go. Sometimes it doesn't work, but other times they get everything they want.

[hill2016]

2. ok

the article says the domestic banks got a bailout from the Greek government.

Well the banks are probably going bankrupt next week (without help from Europe) so I guess you should cheer that huh?

[Igel]

4. Let's see, which narrative do I like better?

One is horribly flawed, the other is very seriously flawed.

Tough choice.

Greece had debt over 115% of GDP before the crisis. Any recession--and we started one before Lehmann failure. In fact the immediate trigger for the financial panic was increased defaults *because* of recession, which would have had a serious effect on Greece and made that percentage increase. The American (and European) housing bubble just added fuel to the fire and having all those securities so opaque that evaluating the risk in them was difficult to impossible certainly didn't help.

That money was pretty much squandered and the promises made in obtaining it largely broken. As a result, Greece had little liquidity and little flexibility when the financial panic finally struck.

We can like the narrative that predatory banks offered loans to poor, ignorant people who really couldn't be expected to understand the complexities of a home mortgage or resist the temptation, but do say that about a government and a nation? And to really say that the subprime lending crisis was *the* cause of the worldwide financial problems is rather self-centered and far too focused on the self.

But that narrative leads me to this kind of conclusion: If Person A is unable to say no to a mortgage, if he's unable to figure out what the payment schedule is or what the obvious risks are, then he's in need of a conservator and manager until he can be tutored in some pretty basic finances. He can't be entrusted with his own fiscal well being, and heaven help society if they allow him to be entrusted with the finances of a family. He's incompetent and a danger to himself, his family, and if "he" is common enough, to society. So strictly for his own good--and who can argue against doing things for the people's welfare--he needs to have a conservator, a manager, a mentor. And that's what they want for Greece.


The subprime mortgage disaster, of course, was only a part of the housing bubble crisis, but we've decided that since we can blame somebody else and make it the entirety of the crisis that's the way to go. It's the part we can easily understand and get really outraged over. The subprime crisis in the US, though, wasn't the trigger, nor was it the heart of the crisis. Recession, bubble, opacity of derivatives, subprime crisis, and, overseas, a couple of other things were helpful, but the first three were the main culprits.

I wonder what would have happened if the early 2008 stimulus, the one that the president and congress fought over at the start of the recession, had been larger? But we were all fiscal conservatives then, running on "I'll balance the budget" promises. We only became Keynesians when we were in charge of spending.

[el_bryanto]

5. I think the issue on the subprime lender issue

is that the industry gave short term rewards to those willing to lend money to people who were bad credit risks or who were good credit risks but had very much over extended. They wanted more subprime loans and mortgages because they were making a killing packaging them up into CMOs and then packaging those up into CDOs.

I agree on your conclusion though; this issue predates the 2008 crisis by quite a bit, and the analysis is a reliant on determining who the "villain" is.

Bryant