[dpweb]

It's interesting the Greece and 2008 global crises are usually brought up, but important to note that with capitalism comes a need for responsibility - especially regarding debt, and those failures were a result of irresponsiblity on the part of the governments and actors involved - not a defect of the capitalist system itself. In both cases, taking on massive debt and quite simply, living beyond one's or a state's means.

[ewzimm]

This seems like a bit of a strawman version of the Greek crisis in relation to capitalism, attributing to human failures actions which were a result of a complex series of coercive acts. The worldwide financial crisis was created because of strong incentives on financial institutions to game the system for profit. This led to a worldwide breakdown of economies, but nations were not equally able to respond with economic stimuli. The Greeks were in a particularly bad situation because of a wealthy class which has been able to avoid taxation. Corrupt government also played a very important part in the process.

But the underlying cause of the crisis was the fact that the rules of capitalism have the property of being exploitable by large financial institutions unless they are under strict public oversight, and even this has been shown to be ineffective. Rational self-interest by banks which damaged the world economy forced Greece into a series of austerity measures which progressively weakened their economy and their ability to pay their debts, locking them into a series of pressure to take yet more loans under terms which lowered their ability to repay them. The logical end of this was their most recent deal which surrendered national sovereignty over their economy.

So what we see from this example is that capitalism has shifted most of the power to those most able to manipulate it, financial institutions, and led to the degredation of national sovereignty. The extreme end of this scenario would be a world without any nations controlled entirely by banks, but I doubt we will get to that point before alternative models take hold, as very few people want to live in that kind of world.

[Zigurd]

More specifically, nations are captured by their SIFI banks and used as a front to coopt the power of sovereigns.

[lotsofcows]

There's a defect in the EU, the Greek government, the Greek people and all the states / people who have made business arrangement with the above?

That's an awful lot of people. Are you sure the problem's not in the system?

[Shivetya]

The problem with Greece isn't capitalism, that much is obvious. The problem is the EU was designed to fail. It was created in such a way to appease the dominant economic countries by guaranteeing the EU would not be a transfer union. This all but doomed weaker economies from the get go.

Tied to one currency they lost the most effective means of combating budgetary and economic issues. Worse, as they become weaker it becomes ever harder for them to generate the hard currency they need.

So if anything what happened is exactly the opposite of capitalism, they could not compete because the rules agreed by governments prevented them. Yes Greece shares fault for working the books but the EU was formed to only favor the powerful countries and protect their interest, this was no union

[yummyfajitas]

Preventing the EU from being a transfer union is not what doomed the weaker economies; the fact that some of the weaker economies tried to turn it into such did.

The more capitalist weaker economies (note: most are poorer than Greece) seem to be doing just fine.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

[digikata]

I wonder if it is possible to design a currency union with just a small amount of decoupling between the individual national bonds and the unified currency? e.g. all members of the union are required to make certain transactions in euro, but issue national debt in their own currency which floats in exchange vs the euro? I think this scheme has problems, but it seems like with the right decoupling points somewhere in the system, you might be able to operate the euro more robustly.