Then the deficit chickenhawks would have to either back down or move for expulsion. And the chickenhawks have a blocking minority, but they don't have a qualified majority.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

yep, but the basis of solidarity has to be honesty, transparency, accountability, trust, reciprocity and mutuality.

And if the demands currently placed on Greece were about any or all of those things, nobody here would be complaining.

But they're not, so we are.

I recognise that we are talking about unequal relationships in many cases, but why should German taxpayers bail out Greek Oligarchs

What's happening right now is that the Greek taxpayers' children are bailing out the German oligarchs.

The "Greek bailout" is mostly a bailout of German banks, and the Greek taxpayers (and the Greek poor, through lack of public services) are going to pay for it (it's a loan, not a gift). A Greek default would be a bailout of the Greek (ordinary citizen and oligarch alike) at the expense of the German oligarchs.

Me, I fail to see the problem with fucking over some oligarchs - hence my acceptance of a default scenario.

(Similarly, capital controls is a way to prevent the Greek oligarchs from absconding from the country - they helped make the mess; they can damn well stick around for the cleanup.)

More generally, Greece will default unless either
(1) Germany stops depressing domestic demand in the service of a mercantilist inflation policy
(2) the EU establishes redistribution programmes that counteract the German mercantilism (which would effectively turn the German mercantilist policy into subsidy by the German taxpayer to the German export industries)
(3) Greece imposes capital controls to bring its trade into balance.

The cash flows being what they are, there is no question about that fact. The only question is how much the Greek people are going to suffer first.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Oligarchs are extremely narrow-minded and selfish. Conservatives such as Merkel somewhat less so.

The EU is doomed by lack of solidarity in the face of any crisis (let alone one of the magnitude we're facing) as long as the EPP is the dominant political force, as it is currently.

Market worship has both been a cause of the crisis and a factor in making it worse.

There is also a moralistic undercurrent to all this, that somehow pain is virtuous. How Christian (Democrat).

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

The Greek debt problem is not new.

It has been there for a while.

In the interim, Greece and Germany traded favors. Greece received political support and Germany received huge orders from Greek on armaments and other projects.

Were Germany actually concerned about corruption and oligarchy in Greece, one place to begin nipping the Greeks in the bud would be: stop bribing them to buy your stuff.

This doesn't mean that Germans are to blame for Greek corruption, but the Germans certainly should not act surprised.

When you look at the banking crisis continentwide, a lot of dirty behavior seems to be tolerated by these leaders.