“Problem is that Greece has been living high off the hog spending the wealth created in other countries (like Germany, France, the UK) and given to them as subsidies because they don’t actually make anything in Greece except olive oil”
While that is mostly true (it’s not all wrong, sure enough), I think it’s not nearly as bad - Greece does have an ok agriculture in at least part of its territory. The thing is, what caused the whole mess isn’t Greece’s economic performance per se. Greece has never been an economic overachiever, and already - in 2004 I believe - there was a small scandal that it might have, er, puffed up its statistics to qualify for using the Euro. Here, again, the original issue started with how Greece, which has a problem with deficits, kinda… misrepresented about the state of their finances to Eurostat (the agency collecting statistics, including economic ones). http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9632910 has some more on it. Oops.
Sure, deficits are never good for a country’s image, but practically lying about them is way worse. When it came out, it obviously caused a huge mess - deficits aside, how can you trust, and invest in, a currency used by a country that lies about how much it gets and owns? To the EU as a whole, that can be even more damaging.
“Problem is that Greece has been living high off the hog spending the wealth created in other countries (like Germany, France, the UK) and given to them as subsidies because they don’t actually make anything in Greece except olive oil”
While that is mostly true (it’s not all wrong, sure enough), I think it’s not nearly as bad - Greece does have an ok agriculture in at least part of its territory. The thing is, what caused the whole mess isn’t Greece’s economic performance per se. Greece has never been an economic overachiever, and already - in 2004 I believe - there was a small scandal that it might have, er, puffed up its statistics to qualify for using the Euro. Here, again, the original issue started with how Greece, which has a problem with deficits, kinda… misrepresented about the state of their finances to Eurostat (the agency collecting statistics, including economic ones). http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9632910 has some more on it. Oops.
Sure, deficits are never good for a country’s image, but practically lying about them is way worse. When it came out, it obviously caused a huge mess - deficits aside, how can you trust, and invest in, a currency used by a country that lies about how much it gets and owns? To the EU as a whole, that can be even more damaging.