Should Greece leave the Euro?

[hard4janira]

You know who should leave the Euro? Germany. Seriously, why should Germany be the whipping boy for all of the dead-weight in Europe. It would be a grand coup if they pulled it off. Let the rest of them sit around holding thier dicks, wondering where the loans are going to come from while they complain about austerity measures.

[flabbybody]

as I've learned from this forum, Germany has benefited significantly from a unified European currency and in fact was the driving force in its implementation.

[hard4janira]

Yes they have. And now they are being asked to pay an unfair share of the burden to bolster floundering economies in countries like Greece where a standard of living has been borrowed for 30 years.

Everybody is going to eat a shit sandwich. You either rip the band-aid off or you peel it off slowly. It is in Greece's best interest to take their lumps and stay in the Euro, but it is in Germany's best interest to dump Greece and take the short term pain that comes with it. What is NOT an option is for Greece to stay in the Euro AND repeal austerity mesures. If it comes to that, Germany is better off on thier own.

[Stavros]

The problem with the above analysis is that is based on economics, whereas politics has tended to determine decisions in the EU -indeed, it was politics that led Greece into the Euro, the country did not meet the criteria for membership in purely economic terms; and for Merkel it is the politics of a united Europe that matter most: in addition to which binding Germany to France and other European countries was intended from the start to be the means to prevent Germany from being the dominant country on the continent -just as France's crippling reparations at Versailles were meant to prevent Germany regaining its pre-1914 economic power: both have been failures in the sense that Germans are just extremely good at marshalling the resources at their disposal to make their country work well -admittedly not always German, given the important role played by foreign workers in the economic miracle -while others have been successful too -think of Italy in the 1960s- but for cultural and structural reasons have not been able to match German prowess in what also is the largest country in Europe, even before re-unification. Germans not only make things people want to buy, they invest in their country at every level, taxes are collected at every level, workers sit on company boards, board-room pay is generous but compares more favourably with other countries, for example it has been stated:

In Germany the ratio between the CEO and lowest paid worker is 12 times; France 15 times; Britain, 22 times. In America it rises to between 400 and 500 times. The country that comes closest to the American ratio is Venezuela's CEO's at 50 times the average pay. Japan prides itself at having the smallest disparity in salary between executives and their employees."

And both Germany and Japan can point to economic success albeit with periods of low growth; but survivors both, and neither has used their power militarily as was once the case.

It may be frustrating for the Germans to be in the top performing tier in Europe compared to other members of the EU, but the EU was never going to be a collection of equals -I now think that if Greeks vote for New Democracy and Syriza and want a government of any kind, there has to be some kind of 'historic compromise' in which right and left agree to move to a centre ground to keep Greece in the Euro, I think they now realise that to leave the EU would be a disaster far worse than the status they have at the moment: the challenge is to reform Greece, to create a country that colllects taxes and uses them for the purpose they are designed for. Italy is in the same situation regarding tax collection and corruption at local levels. These are not impossible dreams, they are all practical. I cannot predict the future, but I now think Greece should stay in the Euro and that monetary union will have to progress to fiscal union at some point in the next five years.

But is the EU as well as Greece willing to take on this challenge? Its called change.

http://www.mindfulmoney.co.uk/9621/e...the-world.html

[Stavros]

Clarification -the second paragraph above is a quote from the article in the link at the end.