'Griekenland verlaat eurozone' #28 Op naar de beslissing

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 21:59 schreef Kowloon het volgende:
Meest logisch lijkt mij om van G¤ of GEUR te spreken. Die tweede is wel verwarrend voor Nederlanders.

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A senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party said on Friday he had trouble trusting Greece's latest proposals to its euro zone creditors as the country had last week decisively rejected the austerity measures in a referendum.

The Greek government sent a package of reform proposals to its euro zone creditors on Thursday in a race to win new funds to avert bankruptcy and will seek a parliamentary vote on Friday to endorse immediate actions.

"We have to be very careful because honestly, because I have a little bit of a problem to trust it because what is the difference between Sunday and today? ... on Sunday the Greek people voted against these measurements," Michael Fuchs, deputy parliamentary floor leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats, told BBC Radio in English.

"We need to make sure that the debt sustainability is now served, if that is not functioning it doesn't make sense."

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The fallout: Companies making plans to flee Greece

A corporate exodus has been underway since 2012.

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In addition, the Greek government submitted a new package of reforms proposals to the Eurogroup and Parliament on Thursday night that included a provision to increase the corporate income-tax rate from 26 percent to 28 percent and to require companies to pay 100 percent of their tax bills a year in advance.

Whether those proposals will clear Greek lawmakers, especially those who are anti-austerity, is not yet clear, but even the inkling that this might be an indication of things to come has many companies seriously considering abandoning Greece.

A corporate exodus from Greece has, in fact, already been under way since 2012, when FAGE, the international dairy company and makers of the top-selling yogurt, transferred its headquarters to Luxembourg to reduce its exposure to the Greek financial market. That year, Coca-Cola Hellenic, a bottling subsidiary of Coca-Cola, settled its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and switched its main market listing to London.

The latest corporate casualty might be the Antenna Group, one of the country's biggest media networks, whose operations include broadcasting, publishing, Internet services, telecommunications and a record label. The Greek press has been abuzz with rumors that the company, founded in 1988, is going to move its financial operations to Amsterdam. When contacted for comment, the company would not confirm whether or not these rumors were true.

Meanwhile, in Nicosia, Cyprus, businessmen and real estate agents are reporting that at least a dozen shipping and financial companies are making queries about corporate space in anticipation of relocating to the capital of the island-nation.

Panos Danos, a real estate property consultant in Athens, said he has had 20 requests in the last week from companies in Greece asking for space in the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia and Limassol.

"Given the uncertainty over the future, it is reasonable that these companies are seeking to relocate," the managing director of Danos, an alliance member of BNP Paribas Real Estate, pointed out. Although he would not reveal the clients' identities, he noted that 70 percent of the queries came from shipping companies.

Michalis Pilikos, the head of the Employer and Industrialists Federation of Cyprus, also confirmed that there have been queries, although he admitted the trend is still at an early stage. He, too, would not reveal names.

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Grexit postponed: How the euro was saved by sinking Greece. Again

Europe has been in a state of economic crisis for so long that it has started to feel inevitable. It is not. The European Union went into a recession along with the rest of the world in 2008; unlike Canada and the United States, much of the continent has never come out. Two of the EU’s largest countries, Italy and Spain, have recovered so little that their economies are smaller than they were seven years ago. The same goes for Portugal.

The unemployment rate for the euro zone, the 19 countries using the common euro currency, is 11.1 per cent – higher, after all these years of supposed recovery, than the Canadian unemployment rate at the bottom of the recession. Italy’s unemployment rate was just 6.1 per cent in 2007; it has since more than doubled. Spain’s count, 22.5 per cent, is nearly triple the prerecession figure.

And leading the parade of the downtrodden, there’s Greece. Nearly 26 per cent of working-age adults are unemployed. More than half its young people are jobless. Gross domestic product has declined by a quarter since 2007. Even if Greece could return to a modest rate of growth, it wouldn’t regain its 2007 level of output and wealth until some time in the 2020s. No Canadian recession, not the stagflation of the early 1970s or the downturn of the early 1990s, even comes close.

None of this had to be. It is not some divine punishment for economic sins. The catastrophe is the product of a series of policy choices made by human beings. Different choices would have led to a different outcomes, and still could, but instead of figuring out how to get out of recession, Europe’s political class keeps turning to policies that have pushed large parts of the continent deeper into it.

Late last year, Greek voters elected a government that promised to go to war against the European establishment, and make it change course. Can you blame them? The status quo is clearly not working for Greece, or for a lot of other Europeans. It’s why, across the continent, we are seeing the rise of angry parties on the extreme right and left. The solutions they propose are often entirely off-base. But the problem they are responding to is real.

In Greece, that reality is extreme. The more the country’s government cuts spending and services, the more an economy in recession contracts further. Greece’s European partners have repeatedly demanded that Greece return to economic health by dramatically chopping public spending, and Athens has largely complied. It has not worked.

The more Athens cuts, the more its economy is shrunk by the cuts, and the more Greece’s unsustainable debt burden, now at 177 per cent of GDP, grows relative to a shrinking economy. This is not some fanciful theory. It’s just arithmetic. Absent other ways of stimulating the economy – say, a lower currency, or an export and tourist boom sparked by recovery in the rest of the euro zone – Europe’s cure for Greece always promised pain without gain.

As we went to press, Greece and the EU leadership appeared to be very close to an agreement to keep the country from defaulting on its debts, to prevent its banking system from collapsing, and to keep it from exiting the euro zone.

To get such an agreement, however, Greece’s leaders have had to capitulate. After months of negotiations, and even after convincing the Greek people to vote No in a snap referendum on Europe’s harsh demands for more austerity, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is now bending his knee and saying, Yes. In return, his government is asking for what appears to be only modest debt relief.

It is a stunning climbdown. Mr. Tsipras’s Syriza party came to power aiming to convince Europe that a change of economic course was needed not just for Greece, but for all Europeans. Europe’s governing elite shrugged. If euro zone finance ministers accept the Greek offer – not yet a certainty, but likely – the result will not be the revolution Mr. Tsipras once hoped for. For the third time in five years, Greece will be signing up for the maintenance of the status quo.

Or rather, status quo-minus. Over the past few weeks, the Greek banking system has largely shut down, and business activity has ground to a halt. Greece’s shrunken economy, which had contracted by 25 per cent as of this spring, has since contracted some more. On its long journey to economic recovery, Greece’s starting line has been moved back, again.

Absent significant debt forgiveness, Greece is going to be back at the table in a year or two. Without a major debt writeoff that makes its debt sustainable, and gives a small country a chance to return to growth, this latest deal, the third Greek rescue attempt since the recession started, will itself need to be rescued.

But in purely political terms, the European project has been saved, at least for now. It has been spared the humiliation of its common currency losing one of its members, which would have spread uncertainty about its future, and threatened crises in other countries. That is not nothing.

However, Europe, led by Germany, has achieved this by once again kicking the can down the road. For the third time in five years, Europe has punted a problem into the future, and the people of the problem country with it. Sometimes there is wisdom in this; some wounds really are healed with time, and some problems, if set aside, resolve themselves. Is Europe’s economic condition such a thing? No.

Across the continent, angry parties of the left and right are being empowered by Europe’s economic policy failures, particularly in Southern Europe. The EU consensus may look alive and well in Brussels. But out on the periphery, a lot of hard rain has already fallen, and anger is growing.

twitter:

rConflictNews twitterde op vrijdag 10-07-2015 om 22:57:42 BREAKING: Greece's Parliamentary President Konstantopoulo abstains from chairing parliamentary session tonight - @L0gg0l reageer retweet

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L0gg0l twitterde op vrijdag 10-07-2015 om 22:58:28 KONSTANTOPOULO CALLS PROPOSALS "ANTIDEMOCRATIC", INSULT TO THE GREEK PEOPLE reageer retweet

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GreeceBHub twitterde op vrijdag 10-07-2015 om 23:08:56 "Passenger traffic in #Greek airports up 14.6 pct in Jan-June:...."(via amna gr) #Greece... http://t.co/WycJHGUTCO reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 23:10 schreef tfors het volgende:
Ik snap echt niet waarom men de Grieken er zo graag in wil houden. De Euro is sterker zonder de Grieken dan met. En het geeft extra motivatie voor de andere probleemlanden om te hervormen, want het zal snel duidelijk worden dat Griekenland zonder de Euro veel slechter af is. Dat is de enige goede reden om de Grieken binnen te houden, in mijn opinie, namelijk voor de welvaart van de Grieken zelf.

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 23:13 schreef Houtenbeen het volgende:

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Als Griekenland eruit gaat, gaan ze aan de stoelpoten van een ander zwak land(Spanje en Italië zagen. En die economieën zijn te groot om om te laten vallen.

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 23:10 schreef tfors het volgende:
Ik snap echt niet waarom men de Grieken er zo graag in wil houden. De Euro is sterker zonder de Grieken dan met. En het geeft extra motivatie voor de andere probleemlanden om te hervormen, want het zal snel duidelijk worden dat Griekenland zonder de Euro veel slechter af is. Dat is de enige goede reden om de Grieken binnen te houden, in mijn opinie, namelijk voor de welvaart van de Grieken zelf.

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Finisterre67 twitterde op vrijdag 10-07-2015 om 23:18:08 Tsipras says, tomorrow's memorandum [the new proposals] is a far cry from our pre-election pledges - a master stroke: honesty. #Greece reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 23:17 schreef Tomatenboer het volgende:

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Aan het hervormen ligt het niet. Griekenland heeft zich al een ongeluk hervormd, ook al is de beeldvorming anders.

Maar een Grexit zou zowel negatief als positief kunnen uitpakken voor de Grieken. Als ze weer terug gaan naar de Drachme kunnen ze in ieder geval wel weer zelf de Drachme devalueren wat gunstig(er) kan uitpakken voor de export bijvoorbeeld, en ze hoeven minder te hervormen zoals de Trojka dat oplegt en wat tot nu toe alleen maar desastreus heeft uitgepakt en binnenlandse koopkracht heeft vernietigd.

Aan de andere kant kan een Grexit de verhoudingen binnen de EU wel onder druk zetten inderdaad. Wellicht gaan op termijn Spanje, Italië en/of Groot-Britannië er dan ook wel wat voor voelen en inzien dat ze ook zonder EU kunnen, of misschien zelfs beter af zijn (als een Grexit uiteindelijk, op de (middel)lange termijn gunstig uitpakt voor Griekenland).

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Op vrijdag 10 juli 2015 23:21 schreef tfors het volgende:

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Je argument draait om het dee mogelijkheid dat het misschien beter gaat zonder de Euro. Ik zeg die mogelijkheid is bijna 0. De Grieken waren al aan het prutsen voor de invoering van de Euro, zelfs tijdens de Euro omdat de andere landen een oogje dicht knepen, en ze zullen het ook verprutsen na een exit, zeker met Syriza aan de macht. Radicaal socialistische regeringen hebben 100% van de keren gefaald in de geschiedenis van de wereld in alle landen.

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ChrisLynnHedges twitterde op vrijdag 10-07-2015 om 23:21:54 .@ProfSteveKeen: "Tsipras Has Just Destroyed #Greece" http://t.co/eO5kaBwj0V http://t.co/CIOgoBaTOg reageer retweet