Surviving in Greece using an alternate currency

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsD1I9bOgEs[/youtube]

That is so sad. The president of Greece just said that his country is in a Depression - similar to the American Depression of the 1930s.

There's much worse ahead for Greece as a country. There are persistent rumours, fueled by high-level executives, that both the IMF and most of the European Union will refuse to pay the next round of financial aid because the Greek government does not appear to be anywhere near the schedule it agreed to. It's said Greece might default soon after more aid is refused, and that it would probably leave the eurozone in that case. Soon after, Moody's announced that the outlook for the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany were now 'negative' instead of 'stable', indicating that these countries - all of them heavily involved in paying for bailouts - are in line to lose their credit.

I'm glad these people are doing better because of a currency. Considering the complaints about Greek work ethic that I've heard when we were paying for them, these people are doing very well for themselves. That goes to show - a number of Greeks from a small town hit by a recession have developed a better economic method than thousands of public servants with enormous salaries and access to enormous amounts of money and official expertise in Brussels. Just to show some of the utter incompetence of the European Union compared to these hard-working Greeks: the European Union spent in excess of 68 billion on 'cohesion and competitiveness for growth and employement [sic]'.

http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2011/2011_en.cfm

Since I don't get involved in the politics of any nation, including the one I live in, I only posted this because I found it interesting that a Grecian city has gone to a form of exchange currency to survive.

Southern Europeans in general are very family and community oriented.

The lazy Greek thing is a myth, the majority of people work long hours doing hard jobs for little pay.

Before you celebrate this scheme you may want to think about what it really is, a tax avoidance scheme.

If you 'barter' your services with other people in this alternative currency, you pay no tax. Avoiding tax isn't really going to fix the national debt problem is it?

I really feel for the Greeks and I am saddened that Greece is in this increasingly desperate state.

When you have an avowedly neo-Nazi party that has been elected to the Greek parliament and has managed to retain its seats AND its share of the vote in a second parliamentary election, running campaigns like this...

...I think the time has come to be worried about the future.

When they say "far-right", in the case of Golden Dawn they go far, far beyond the BNP in policy and are more extreme even than the old National Front here in Britain. They're a nasty bunch of thugs and are as far away from genuinely democratic movements in Europe as it's possible to get.

That doesn't matter. Actually, I want Greece to default and leave the eurozone, as it probably will. It means the European Union will finally be a joke to everyone instead of just those who aren't politicians or hoping for some comfortable anonymous position in Brussels, and our ruling parties will have a lot to explain. They said, literally, "we will get our money back from Greece." That's going to give the Socialist Party and Geert Wilders a lot of material to remind them of.

Then I don't think you have been paying attention to the last few years.

Look at the carnage and panic caused by Lehmans, if Greece goes so does Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, the defaults would mean complete bankruptcy of pretty much all the banks in the rest of Europe swiftly followed by the rest of the European countries (France, Holland, Germany etc) finding themselves in the position of Greece with massive borrowing costs.

Greece has already balanced it's budget apart from the debt interest, it is those high repayment costs that are crippling it at the moment.

You shouldn't believe for a second that rabobank will be around for long if half of Europe breaks up and defaults the money you will need to spend to try and rescue the Dutch banking system will make the Greek support look like pocket money.

That does not matter. If we don't have the European Union, effectively a bully boy for international banks and interest groups, we'll be much more capable of handling international commerce. The path we're facing might not have rainbows hovering above it, or puppies joyfully running with us, but the path we're on now leads straight into the abyss, and most ordinary people in Europe seem to know that by now. We're just facing a choice between a good chance of the situation improving in the long term, or the current path leading to certain destruction. In the next European Parliament elections, if they're held at all, I'll vote for Wilders.



Greece, apparently, is behind on schedule. Today, it turned out the Greek economy is in even more trouble than previously thought.
It's going to end this year or next year for Greece, and hopefully soon after for the European Union as the unfair crony construct it is.



That's not really true. We've pledged 20% of our annual GDP to a new fund. Everyone opposed it, but parties previously accusing Wilders of being undemocratic and authoritarian suddenly changed their opinions about democracy when Wilders proposed a referendum. We've lost anywhere between €140bn and €200bn already. If this fund collapses, which it will - no way of stopping it - we'll have 20% of our annual GDP added to our national debt. That's right. The European Union's idea of solving a debt crisis is increasing the debts of the few countries still in a viable position. Moody's noticed that, and we're now on the shortlist for being downgraded, along with Germany and Luxembourg.

do you have some links to some proper news sources about those 20% because i find that a tad hard to believe,

20% of a whole eonomy means you would have to cut just about everything by something.

There's a lot of uncertainty about what we've spent on the European Union this year. There certainly are contributions we're not allowed to know about. In addition to the usual fees, a net contribution of 0.26% of our GDP after the subsidies companies here received (and much more without those), we pledged ~50 billion to the European Stability Mechanism, which is going to be empty in two years and abolished in five. We've also pledged 3.2 billion to Greece through a temporary fund, 2.7 billion to Ireland and 4.1 billion to Portugal. In addition, the government has forced banks to invest in Greece and other pieces of worthless European debt paper.

We're going to be over our heads in debt now. Remember: they tried to save €200 million on education despite the largest protests in our history. That's not even 1 in 250 of what we're paying for that anonymous fund for now. If anything, it's the European Union and the national governments supporting it that are causing the situation to become gradually worse. We'll all be paying in currencies like that if dangerously-incompetent eurocrats are allowed to drag the hollow rotten corpse of the European Union on.

http://www.government.nl/issues/europea ... pean-union

If they do use an alternative currency and stick a middle finger up to their national debt it would show the world how much of a farce debt actually is.

but even the net 4 billion loss isnt anything close to 2% much less 20.

your GDP is 820 billion something

It's not their debt to begin with. It's their government's debt. Greek people are more community-oriented, but a lot less government-oriented. The government, to them, is more a necessary evil that they want to deal with only if it benefits them. And until recently, they were granted that wish, which is why tens of thousands of dead people were still receiving state pensions and one island had a lot of blind people on welfare who turned out not to be blind but had received welfare because of a doctor and a local public servant cooperating to deliver them welfare.

That's also why it infuriates me. We're not helping the Greek people get back on their feet. We're helping the Greek government avoid temporary financial collapse in order for them to forward the little money they have to banks at the expense of people whose misery is dragged on for months every time we pay them money we don't want to spend.

There is much more, but information about that is scarce. I'd have to look for it intensively, because the less people know about the European Union, the more likely they are to support it. The reason we have growing numbers of people saying we should leave it is because there have been several announcements. Additionally, if the situation as it is now is dragged on, I expect the chance of being asked for dozens of billions more to be about 100%. However, if Greece collapses, we'll have a lot to remind our eager-to-pay governments of. They literally promised us all money we sent to a temporary fund for Greece would return. One of them expected interest. Now, it looks like we're losing all of it.

then find the links,

dont you have a fully transparant financial charter?

in denmark we can go to the government website and find it.

as said 20% sounds unbelievable so if it really is that there is not a snowballs chance in hell you cant find links describing it.