Greek Island Samos – Votsalakia

Words about the financial crisis in Greece from around the world.

Right now, the political and the financial situation in Greece are not promising a bright future for Greece. Here is a collection of what the world is thinking of the situation in Greece at the moment.

German Chancellor Mrs. Angela Merkel told Greece yesterday to fix its fiscal problems and added that due to the Greek crisis the common Euro currency was facing its worst test ever.

Greek Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou is due in Berlin this Friday to meet with Merkel. She spoke after days of friction, played out between the Greek and German media, over whose responsibility it is to act.

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Like in ancient times, Greece has once more become an example for the world today.

Editorial writer and columnist Anne Appelbaum, of the Washington Post analyzes the situation:

“I have seen America’s future, and it is Greece. By this I do not mean that the Midwest will soon be covered with ancient ruins or that Texans will swap hamburgers for feta cheese. I mean that the ongoing Greek financial crisis is the kind of crisis the United States might face in a few years, if we continue to make the kinds of mistakes that the Greeks have made over the past decade.” And she goes on: “Some of Greece’s economic problems are highly specific. The country has an unusually old-fashioned legal system, a bureaucracy straight out of a Kafka novel and a byzantine system of regulation”

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Takis Michas from the Wall Street Journal describes the financial situation in a nutshell:

“In Greece, as elsewhere, if the management of a company reports misleading figures about the company’s financial situation in order to boost the price of the shares or to support the sale of securities, it risks criminal charges. Around the world, including in Greece, this is securities fraud. But in Greece, unlike elsewhere, if those responsible for the deception are members of a (previous) government and if the victims are “foreigners” (“xenoi,” in Greek) they run no such risk. The most they can expect is slap on the wrist and a mild – Please don’t do it again!”

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Gevin Hewitt of BBC states on his blog:

“Key advisers in Athens believe that you can’t buck the markets, and that Greece needs to show it is backed up by a pool of money.

The markets are already factoring in that there will be a bail-out or rescue. Intense discussions are going on involving European officials. They include Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the Euro Group and Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank. European finance ministers were holding emergency talks.”

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It’s scary what is going on at the moment and there have already been rumors that Greece will have Drachmas again…

Athens goes up in Flames again

By Maria Margaronis:

It all begun with the death of a 15 year old child, a school-boy with a chubby face, long brown curly hair and a black punk-rock T-shirt, an ordinary teenager trying to be cool. Though he was privately educated in a wealthy Athens suburb, Alexis Grigoropoulos didn’t hang out at the mall. On Saturday night he was downtown in ungentrified Exarcheia, a neighborhood where the indy crowd collects in cafes, leftists and anarchists and music lovers, potheads and addicts and professors, dissenters and the young, and the object in recent years of an intensive cleanup operation. The police account of the events that led to Alexis’s death had the patrol car set upon by a crowd of stone-throwing youths and the boy himself wielding a petrol bomb. But eyewitness reports and videos shot on mobile phones tell a quite different story.

Alexis and his friends were out to celebrate a name-day. Some unknown people passed and threw small objects at the car; the officers stopped, walked back to Alexis’s group and began to curse and threaten them. According to one of the boys, Alexis tossed an empty plastic bottle. The officer aimed and fired three shots, two in the air and one that pierced his chest.

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