There is fury that the better-off and the oligarchs have succeeded in avoiding paying for a financial disaster that was largely of their making.

Most of the debt in the world cannot and will not ever be repaid.[/quote.

Yes, I once had a thing on that. If you borrow ten units at 10% interest, you need 11 units to clear the debt, but as there were only ten units in the first place, how can you ever pay it back, if you see what I mean?

Some Germans today insist that a debt is a debt, and that Greece must repay in full. They should know better from their own history, starting with Keynes’s unsuccessful plea to lower Germany’s reparations burden [after WW-I]. They should recall the relief that Germany was granted through the Marshall plan, and the 1953 London agreement on German debts. Did Germany"deserve" the relief in 1953? That was not the right question. Germany’s new democracy needed the relief, and Germany needed a fresh start. It played a major role in the economic recovery and construction of Germany’s democratic institutions.

Alanarchy wrote:

Most of the debt in the world cannot and will not ever be repaid.[/quote.

Yes, I once had a thing on that. If you borrow ten units at 10% interest, you need 11 units to clear the debt, but as there were only ten units in the first place, how can you ever pay it back, if you see what I mean?

So now that Mr. Tsipras has won, and won big, European officials would be well advised to skip the lectures calling on him to act responsibly and to go along with their program. The fact is they have no credibility; the program they imposed on Greece never made sense. It had no chance of working.

If anything, the problem with Syriza’s plans may be that they’re not radical enough. Debt relief and an easing of austerity would reduce the economic pain, but it’s doubtful whether they are sufficient to produce a strong recovery. On the other hand, it’s not clear what more any Greek government can do unless it’s prepared to abandon the euro, and the Greek public isn’t ready for that.

Still, in calling for a major change, Mr. Tsipras is being far more realistic than officials who want the beatings to continue until morale improves. The rest of Europe should give him a chance to end his country’s nightmare.

Ten years ago, Syriza scraped just 4% of the vote in Greek elections. This week, the leftwing party took control under the charismatic leadership of Alexis Tsipras. How did it do it? For 22 days, Paul Mason followed the party’s campaign trail and saw an anti-austerity message delivered with youthful plausibility win over a nation.

duncan_mk wrote:The old Chinese curse:

"May you iive in interesting times"

Well, if you were to believe many of the news reports and opinion pieces of the past few days, you’d think that it was a disaster — that it was a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens. Some factions within Syriza apparently think so, too. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor.

[...] So did the current Greek government back down and agree to aim for those economy-busting surpluses? No, it didn’t. In fact, Greece won new flexibility for this year, and the language about future surpluses was obscure. It could mean anything or nothing.

[...] Meanwhile, the first real debtor revolt against austerity is off to a decent start, even if nobody believes it. What’s the Greek for “Keep calm and carry on”?