About 10 drachmas an hour, enough to buy a henway (if he had a job)
Today (Sunday) is election day and the results are coming in.
The mainstream “Conservative” (by Greek standards) party support going with the bailout – only the far left party wants to tear up the bailout agreement and default. The mainstream Conserative and fastly shrinking moderate left parties want to take the money from Germany but ignore the demands for Germany for German control of the Greek Government and its budget.
So among the outcomes would be…
1) An “unexpected” victory by the far left or at least enough to prevent any government from being formed, creating a default very quickly
2) Neither main party winning enough for outright control and either having to work with each other, or partner with another fringe party for a weak shaky government
3) Nothing much happens and Germany shrugs its shoulders and gives Greece more rope to hang itself
4) Tim Geithner loots the US Treasury to bail out Goldman Sachs
5) Tanks roll over the German / Greece border and Germany repossesses all the BMWs
6) Turkey invades Cyprus and creates a huge distraction and breaks up NATO..
7) Art Bell returns to doing Coast to Coast full time.
Based on recent “unexpected” election results and late polls not done by the government, I suspect the “Tear up the treaty and default” party is going to win, maybe even an outright victory giving them control of the government.
p.s. – I know there is no German / Greece border 🙂
I guess the Germans should have held onto to that Lebensraum after all.
Well, it looks like “mainstream” party got around 30% of the vote and the “Screw it, let’s default and riot” party got 26%. Alarming to some is that the “extreme fringe” “right wing” party got enough votes to get enough seats to potentially become a power broker in forming a government.
In spite of it all Greece will pull out and default and the Drachmas will be worth about the same as a Zimbabwe Dollar or a Weimar Republic Deutsche Mark. The old adage applies here: “You can give a man a fish…”
“… And then he’ll expect free fish for life?”
I tend to agree – we are about to play chicken for high stakes. All this election did was buy time for Goldman Sachs et al to pull out their money from bad loans and get government entities to stand in their place until the roof caves in. Austerity by itself is no solution.
It’s not a coincidence that the countries that most aggressively tried to enforce Kyoto CO2 emissions and chased power generation and industry out of their countries are the ones that went broke. As power consumption is dropping in Greece, the forced purchase of prohibitively expense “green enery” by a power company that can’t raise prices puts them in an impossible situation. Russia, Turkey and Italy (from Libya) are at the point this week of having to decide if they shut off the natural gas supplies for Greece.