A really nice, long piece on Greece and how it is dealing with the financial crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/the-way-greeks-live-now.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Thanks for posting, very enlightening!

I posted some related info yesterday about the Jesuits in Rome being the owners of the global banks.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-870476.0.html



Highlights . . . .

They have no savings, they told me, because when they bought their home in 2000, they used their life savings as a down payment.

(Save 10% of your income for yourself!)


“This is a country with 300 days of sunshine per year,” he began, proceeding into a rambling, fast-paced discourse, the central point of which was that in buying into the euro, Greece tried foolishly to mimic other countries and in so doing shifted away from its natural advantages and way of life. “Working in offices is good in countries where there is lots of rain,” he said. “Greeks don’t need to be in offices. Athens has doubled in size in a couple of decades — it’s now half the population of the country! Two-hour traffic jams, man! After we joined the euro, the mentality totally changed. Suddenly it was like if you still live in the small village where you were born, you must be retarded. So Greeks left their islands and their villages and moved to the city, and they became maniacs. They started expecting loans and handouts.”

The modern Greek mentality, according to Evmorfidis, is a hyped-up version of the debt-ridden American consumerism of recent memory. “Greek people would take out a loan to buy a luxury car so they could say, ‘I have money,’ ” he said. “Crazy! I would run into someone I used to know, and suddenly he’s talking to me about the stock exchange. I say: ‘Come on, man! What do you know about the stock exchange? Let’s talk about apples and olives!’ ”

The austerity measures imposed by the government as it tries to appease distant bankers and governments have caused hardships for ordinary people


A lot of people seem to be coming around to Zacharias’s way of thinking. According to the Greek farmers’ union, between 2008 and 2010 — even before the crisis reached its height — 38,000 people lost or gave up their jobs, as their dream of euro-capitalism died, and returned to the land, often to their home villages on the islands.

Improbably enough, a Greek economist named Yanis Varoufakis has been drawing attention in many of the hot spots of global finance lately, offering the Minotaur myth as a metaphor for understanding recent macroeconomic events. As Varoufakis writes in his recent book, “The Global Minotaur,” the world in which we have been living until recently functioned thanks to the voracious consumption of a different kind of beast. After World War II, the U.S. built up the infrastructure of its European allies as well as its former enemies, all of whom became trading partners. The U.S., with its great industrial and financial might, became the world’s surplus nation: its profits flowed out to its allies in the form of aid and investments. By the early 1970s, however, other countries had robust economies, and the U.S. was a debtor nation. “At that moment, certain very bright men within the American financial hierarchy made a stunning realization,” Varoufakis told me. The realization was that it didn’t matter if the U.S. was the biggest surplus or biggest debtor nation. What mattered was controlling the world’s primary currency, which would allow the United States to continue to recycle the global economic surplus. The idea was not unlike the thinking behind a casino — whichever gamblers are winning or losing, the house, which sets the terms and takes its cut, always wins.

So a new system came into being, in which a huge part of the world’s capital flows went to service debt originating in the United States. American debt, and the need to feed it, would be the modern Minotaur. The Wall Street financial houses became the handmaidens of the Minotaur. “The massive flow of capital into Wall Street gave it the impetus for financialization,” Varoufakis said, referring to the creation of derivatives and other risky financial vehicles. “And so Wall Street created a great deal of private money, with which it flooded the world and created huge bubbles, in the U.S. housing market and elsewhere.”

When that system came crashing down in 2008, Varoufakis says, “it was then only a matter of time that the euro would come into crisis.” Europe’s powerhouse economies — essentially, the northern countries — no longer had a place to sell their goods.