More White House contradictions. This time, the EU

[Cybran]

People will buy German exports, whether they're cheap or expensive.

Germany and the ECB keep the euro undervalued to boost German exports. Without this you wouldn't have this unfair trade surplus.

[Slant]

Buying their products, going there to vacations etc.

Going on vacation, sure. Buying their products? What products?

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Germany and the ECB keep the euro undervalued to boost German exports. Without this you wouldn't have this unfair trade surplus.

Yes, because everyone buys German products, because they're cheap. Have you compared prices recently? Germany is squatting in the top price range across all industries. Our shit costs more than any other shit. Why? Because it's awesome shit, and people still buy it. Tell me, when did Bulgaria last build a freaking tunneller that can dig road-sized holes through pretty much anything from seabed to granite rock? Oh right, never. Well then... Let's make our stuff more expensive. Who's giving up drilling a hole to save your commuters 3h of driving per day? Nobody? Ah, okay... we'll loan the tunneler to you for say, a cheap 115% price increase, that's how generous we are. Still not considering not buying one?

Keep deflecting, but you're still missing the point. We build good shit. Bulgaria doesn't.

[Cybran]

We build good shit.

Your government wouldn't collude with the ECB to devalue the Euro against the Dollar if this was true. Your are like China.

[Slant]

Your government wouldn't collude with the ECB to devalue the Euro against the Dollar if this was true. Your are like China.

Except, unlike China, we built high quality shit.

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Hey I am Greek and I can only answer that question with difficulty.
We have amazing food products but they are amazing because they are fresh, low on conservatives and made through traditional, low yield agriculture. In short, they cannot be exported as anything other than luxury items.
We still have kept a decent chemical industry that makes fairly good drugs but everyone makes their own so no one would displace theirs for ours.
We have decent tech initiatives; those could work because right now many fail to launch because it's nearly impossible to find funds for a startup.

What we could potentially do is what Ireland did. Drop corporate taxes and attract corporations that can afford to be physically distant to their markets. The cost of living in Greece is low, entertainment in Athens is diverse and extremely high quality, the sun shines most of the year and housing prices have tanked. You could move such business to Athens and have your employees live like kings.

Now, this is something I have thought of a lot in the past few years. I would absolutely endorse dumping a few billion into startup projects to build up a high tech industry in Greece. That could actually work, you've got the educated people, you've got lots of space (once you remove the rocks). And it might just take off and drag you out of the swamp.

Why isn't it happening? What's our money used for (besides dealing with debt)?

Drop corporate taxes? How's that decreasing debt? You'd have to raise them again at some point to profit from that strategy, what would force companies to stay in the country if they only move there for low tax reasons?

[Cybran]

Except, unlike China, we built high quality shit.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUSKBN1500VJ

U.S President-elect Donald Trump warned German car companies he would impose a border tax of 35 percent on vehicles imported to the U.S. market, a plan that drew sharp rebukes from Berlin and hit the automakers' shares.

All Europeans should put 35% tariff on your products and then we will see.

[Ravenblade]

Going on vacation, sure. Buying their products? What products?

Agricultural products. Services in general etc.

Greece isn't going to lead in heavy industry any time soon for sure and their inability to compensate for overly cheap products from abroad is hurting them. If any country would and should quit the Euro it should be Greece, really. Their entry was after all based on trickery and polished figures. They haven't had a proper chance to consolidate themselves.

[Slant]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUSKBN1500VJ

All Europeans should put 35% tariff on your products and then we will see.

Yes, and I still contest... what else would they buy? I mean, ignoring the fact that half of the European car industry is German... they love our cars, which are already horribly overpriced. VW just overtook Toyota to become the #1 car company globally. That's how much people love our cars. BMW and Mercedes are leading the luxury sedan segments and the sports car segments (anything below super sport cars, which are dominated by Italy, naturally, cos they know how to make shit fast and cool).

Put tariff on our products. We're still one of two, maybe three countries that produce tunnellers like the one I described. I'm just counting the obvious examples, but if I had the time to research, I could give you specific examples of niches that we dominate, simply because nobody else is building that shit. Put 35% tariffs on those, but people will pay for those. And we'll just slap the tariff on top of our prices, so it'll be them that pay the extra cost.

[ati87]

I'd argue that no country needed austerity. Their overspending got them into trouble because of inefficiencies in different sectors, poor economic growth and more importantly not having natural market corrections via their own separate currencies. Austerity was not needed to fix what was wrong, austerity was needed cause they owed a fuckton and needed to pay it back (which is a perfectly valid reason).
What the Eurozone needs is much greater alignment in the economic competencies of its members. They are highly disparate and the single currency is certainly hurting the weaker economies on the long term. What Southern Europe needs is not so much to spend less but rather to make much more. If they can't then either they need to not be in the Euro or Northern Europe needs to allow for much greater transfers of cashflows between states which will never happen.

You're arguing semantics, they owned a shit ton of money because they bored, the fact that they never really bothered making a broad economy may be the reason for borrowing but looking for a cause isn't a solution.

Greece had so much inefficiency going on that they needed to cut back spending and cut back on that inefficiency, you don't need to hire 10 people to fill in 1 job spot for example (what greece did).

In this case you could have done two things, first bring back control over government spending which means cutting back on unnecessary spending or try to outgrow you're spending.

Since the 2e part was the cause you don't double down on that.

[Slant]

[QUOTE=Ravenblade;44689621]

Going on vacation, sure. Buying their products? What products?[/COLOR]

Agricultural products. Services in general etc.

Greece isn't going to lead in heavy industry any time soon for sure and their inability to compensate for overly cheap products from abroad is hurting them. If any country would and should quit the Euro it should be Greece, really. Their entry was after all based on trickery and polished figures. They haven't had a proper chance to consolidate themselves.

Here's a little story I read sometime ago.... it's about olive oil. Greece started with that. They exported the stuff to Germany and we discovered it was quite awesome to use on salad, for cooking in general. So we gobbled it up like it was the latest dietary trend that it was. Except... there were problems. Deliveries were not punctual, they were not completely fulfilled (imagine opening a box and seeing gaps were bottles should be...), labels were badly painted (literally, painted with a pen) if they didn't outright fall off the bottles because they were incompetently glued to them...

Along come Italy and Spain. They dealt with Germans before. They know we were suckers for superficial things like punctuality, completing orders, nice looking labels... and they started ramping up their olive production and started selling olive oil to Germany. In nice clean boxes, with neat lables, always the correct amount, on time. And they grew, and boomed. Now, who are the European leaders in the olive oil trade? Tiny hint: They use the latin alphabet.

It's not that I'm disagreeing with you. It's that people need to stop looking outside Greece to fix Greek problems. The fixing starts in Athens. And once they're in a position to sell quality products, we'll buy their products just like we love to buy from Italy and Spain. I don't actually taste the difference between Italian or Spanish Wine, but I lik variety nonetheless. So I'll buy Spanish wine because it's spanish, and sometimes I buy Italian wine, because why the heck not, at some point I might taste the difference. And I sure as heck would buy Greek wine, too. Except... I hardly see any in our stores.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

What Greece can be good at:

Programming (our programmers actually have very good scores in most metrics)
Tourism
A place for retirees (especially if the health industry recovered somewhat to pre-crisis levels, we had very good healthcare and low cost of living)
High quality produce (not for mass use but as luxury items)
Shipping

Yeah, Greece has a really strong shipping sector. The problem is that it generates no income for the government due to not having to pay taxes, and the minute that is brought up people go on strike.

[Cybran]

VW just overtook Toyota to become the #1 car company globally. That's how much people love our cars.

By cheating on emission tests and other shady shit. Trump will set you straight, him and Putin will double team you like the good old days.

[Slant]

By cheating on emission tests and other shady shit. Trump will set you straight, him and Putin will double team you like the good old days.

Putin? Wtf? Putin is in no position to set anyone straight but countries like Ukraine. :P Hahaha. We're sanctioning the shit out of Russia and the only response Putin has is to be upset over it. He literally has no angle from which to attack us except make East European countries nervous. Which we counter by just planting more NATO troops there, which... you'll see, actually brings our cultures closer together. Soldiers in peacetime are a bit like diplomatic and cultural exchange. This is good for NATO. Good for the EU. Haha, you're funny.

[ati87]

Germany and the ECB keep the euro undervalued to boost German exports. Without this you wouldn't have this unfair trade surplus.

Stop making this crap up, the Euro was pre-EU crisis bloody high to the point it was almost 1-1 with the British Pond.

What happend was the EU and financial crisis, in other words when their was weekly speculation about the end of the EU and Euro.

See links below, the Euro took a nosedive in 2008/2009 when the financial crisis happen and after that it never really recovered to the previous levels because the EU/Greece crisis happend.

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?fr...o=GBP&view=10Y

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?fr...o=USD&view=10Y

People constantly contradicting themselves when it comes to the Euro. First it was all about how it was to expensive for Greece which hurt them and not it's about how it's to cheap which hurts them.

[Slant]

And here I come to inform you that the best oil they sell you is still Greek; they just buy it off of us and remarket it

Hey, I wouldn't be surprised at all. But it's a bit sad that all they do is repackage it, slap a neat label on it and make more profit than you guys do. It's a bit disgusting, but honestly... can you blame them?

[Damajin]

Yeah, this happens in every single administration though expect it to happen more in this one. Message discipline is something every single administration struggles with, especially as the people within it segment into factions.

[ati87]

You certainly need to fire a lot of people in the public sector (which is easier said than done since it is unconstitutional to do so and governments have had to be very creative to do this in the past 8 years, often by dumping them on pension). But it is vastly more important to improve the IT infrastructure.

In 2013 Greece was supposed to transition to electronic invoicing (tracked by the state). It got delayed again and again until early 2015 when the government simply suspended the program since they found out they had bought a system that could not even handle a tenth of the necessary traffic. Greece still doesn't have a comprehensive land register. A centralized system for drug prescriptions did not exist until 2014 and it is still grossly inefficient. The online tax system can handle traffic so badly that on tax season accountants wake up in the middle of the night to make the submissions. All this is equally if not more important than reducing the number of public employees. And we don't have all that not because the government spends too much; we don't have it because the government did not spend properly.

)

Only thing I see here is the incompetence of the greek government in which the EU really can't do much specifically. Sure they can lay down goals and punish them if they don't reach those goals but unless Greece wants it's democracy suspended the EU can't/won't actively take a role in governing Greece.

And it doesn't have to be either or, reducing waist-full spending (firing people) and increase revenue by whatever means. Just because Greek government failed at the 2e part doesn't mean that they shouldn't be doing the first part.

[Cybran]

the only response Putin has is to be upset over it.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39037936

He is going to support AfD and parts of the SPD to get his way.

He literally has no angle from which to attack us except make East European countries nervous. Which we counter by just planting more NATO troops there, which... you'll see, actually brings our cultures closer together. Soldiers in peacetime are a bit like diplomatic and cultural exchange. This is good for NATO. Good for the EU. Haha, you're funny.

Like the BundesWehr soldiers who gang raped a woman in Lithuania last month? You people are sick.

[Mihalik]

And here I come to inform you that the best oil they sell you is still Greek; they just buy it off of us and remarket it

https://www.bestoliveoils.com/explore/country/

I'm sorry to have to point this out, but unfortunately that is not true anymore. Greece produces a lot of cheap mid-market oils that major Italian producers basically blend into their own mid-market and Spanish mid-market oils to stock supermarket shelves, restaurant kitchens, and processed food stuff like margarine across the world. Italian companies do this with a lot things, like cheap Spanish white wines, which are neither popular or really unique like Spanish Rioja or Ribera, so they buy it up in bulk, blend it with sour German reds, label it as mid-market Rosato and sell it with a massive up-mark to women like it's worth a dime.

Greece is capable of producing good olives, but quality control, manufacturing etc lags.

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Like the BundesWehr soldiers who gang raped a woman in Lithuania last month? You people are sick.

Dude. Enough.

[Slant]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39037936

He is going to support AfD and parts of the SPD to get his way.

Like the BundesWehr soldiers who gang raped a woman in Lithuania last month? You people are sick.

Wow... that particular myth has been debunked and is rumoured to originate in Russia. I am so fucking glad you're picking up on it, it's almost as good as proof that it's Russia trying to influence us. We're onto you guys now, though. Heck, even Lithuanian authorities said it was bullshit. Like, it's been PROVEN bullshit. God, this is so funny. :P

Btw, any support Putin gives to AfD is going to further ruin that party. So, please... Putin, go ahead and support AfD. It'd quicken up their demise. And I doubt SPD is going to risk another Schröder fiasco. They're quite firmly positioning themselves to not be "buddies" with Putin for that very same reason. But hey, don't let me destroy your bubble. :P

[Macaquerie]

You cannot imagine how many Greeks are excited about Trump btw. Not because they believe in his policies but because yet again they are looking for someone to save them and for some peculiar reason they think Trump will make Schauble give us money . . .

Oh I'm sure Trump knows plenty about Greek problems and how to fix them. I mean, Greece is a wonderful country, tremendous people, but those refugees flooding across the border, sad! But really, you look at Greece and you look at what they've done and you look at someone like Socrates who's done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.