Greece… This beautiful country on the Mediterranean is now the topic du jour, again, and again, and again… Will they stay in the Eurozone, will they leave? The same question has been asked for the past 5 years now. Yes, that’s 5 years already. Each year the question is asked several times, with a huge market drop the month it’s asked, then followed by a couple of months of good market performance (yes, someone, somewhere is playing the short-long game very successfully).

The question hasn’t changed, but the circumstances did. Greeks have experienced austerity, and, according to the polls held last Sunday, they haven’t yet developed a taste for it. So they voted against it. Or was it a vote against something else?

Last Sunday, there was article in the New York Times titled that “Greeks Say No to Austerity” which made me think how much influence a title can have on the readers’ minds. The title could have been something like “Greeks Don’t Want to Pay Their Country’s Debts”, which is also true, and it would have had the opposite results on the readers’ minds, but instead, the New York Times elected to stick with the former title, making it look as if the Greeks were doing the right thing by voting against something bad (everyone hates austerity and everyone thinks it’s bad). I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that all the global powerful media is lobbying for a Grexit (a new term coined for Greece Exit [from the Euro]), and they’re doing so by further inciting the Greeks to stand against any compromise that will solve their country’s debts. I do have an idea why, but that idea is full of conspiracy theories and I don’t want to share it as I might be very wrong…

The Euro was a bad idea from the get-go, everybody knows it: the economies are not the same, and the people are definitely not the same. There’s nothing that binds the people of Europe together, except for 2 things: That they are on the same continent, and that they share, to some extent, the same religion. That’s it! The Germans don’t care about the Greeks and don’t feel that they are responsible for supporting them through their tax dollars euros. The Greeks on the other hand, believe that they have done the Eurozone a favor by joining it but it didn’t work out and now the rest of Europe must pay.

So, is there a way out of this mess?

The only way out, in my opinion, is forgiveness, relaxed restructuring, and, of course, abandoning the concept of austerity. Something that Europe will be very hesitant to do but that must be done. Any alternative compromise will take us to square one in a couple of years, and with even dire consequences.

The bottleneck to any solution right now is that the other PIIGS are watching what’s happening, very, very closely. Greece is just the tip, the very tip, of the Iceberg. See for yourself:

I think there’s something cooking in the oven for Greece now, something really bad, with a very sour taste that will stick in every Greek’s mouth for decades. The Greeks are depressed, and it’s always easy to manipulate depressed people. Ironically, the now holier-and-richer-than-thou Germany is a great example of how the depressed can be manipulated.

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