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davywavyThere’s a joke which sums up the Greek economic collapse.
Two towns, one Greek, one Spanish, were twinned, and in the first year the mayor of the Greek town goes to visit his Spanish counterpart. The Spanish mayor takes him to his house, a delightful villa on a hill overlooking the town.
“How on earth could you afford this house on a mayor’s salary?” says the Greek.
The Spaniard waves one hand out of the window. “Do you see that bridge over the river?”
The Greek nods.
“Well, the EU gave us enough money to build a two-lane bridge, but we built a one-lane toll bridge instead and money left over was enough to build me this house.”
A year later, the Spaniard goes to visit the Greek, who is living in a huge house overlooking his town. It is luxuriously appointed with gold taps, two fast cars in the garage, and every convenience the Spaniard can think of. “How on earth could you afford this house on a mayor’s salary?” he asks.
The Greek waves his hand towards the window. “Do you see that bridge out there?” he asks.
“No.”
Long term readers might have noticed that from time to time I indicate a less-than-positive opinion of Gordon Brown. He is, I periodically suggest, the economic equivalent of Jimmy Savile and he regarded the British economy in much the same light as Jimmy regarded the children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. However, as my car whizzed past row upon row of boarded up and closed shops on my recent trip to Greece I got to wondering; perhaps I was being too harsh on Gordon? Perhaps he was no worse than an economic Stuart Hall or Gary Glitter? Perhaps, I thought, looking at the wreckage which the twin catastrophe of an economic collapse and an inability to devalue and default had wrought upon Greece, there was worse out there than Gordon?
You’ll be glad to know I quickly came to my senses and realized my initial opinion of Brown was entirely correct; but if you want an object lesson in just how bad things can get when the population of a country not only collude in but actively encourage their own economic destruction a trip to the Hellenes is instructive.
The she-David and I had seized what looked like a cheap holiday somewhere rather nice on a website called something like Ohgodpleasecometogreecebeforeweresorttocannibalism.com, and ended up in a development of studios and villas on Laganas Bay in Zacynthos, which according to legend is the place Odysseus set out from on his way to fight in the Trojan War. On first glance it was everything you’d expect Greece to be; gloriously sunny, a crystal-blue Aegean lapping gently against the beach, hillsides dotted with pines and olive trees interspersed with white-walled and red-roofed houses of the sort that get put on postcards and make the place one of most attractive countries in the world to visit.
It’s only when you get close up and look that you realise that perhaps half of those attractive buildings have been abandoned during the development and now sit empty, forlorn, and with “For Sale ring 983457396592” scrawled sadly on the wall in spray paint. You can date by the rings of the trees growing out of deserted driveways and between cracks in empty paving stones when the workers just walked off their jobs four or five years ago and never came back, and now, you realise, what you thought were the signs of population and prosperity are in fact shells, ruins. Once, Greek hills were dotted with the ruins of the palaces of legend. Phillip’s palace at Mycenae stands dramatically atop of cliff, and it’s like innumerable clones of this ruin have been built in imitation.
Once you’ve been there for a while, something else becomes clear. Even with the abandoned and closed buildings, Greece still has perhaps twice as much infrastructure as it needs for the number of tourists who are actually there. I was there in the height of the tourist season, and yet Tavernas and bars were all half empty; the place we stayed in had rooms for a hundred people, but at no point were there more than thirty or forty actually present, and that story seemed to be true wherever you went. I got friendly with the hotel manager whilst we were there and he told me that he also ran another hotel which was being closed because it was losing money hand over fist. The one we were staying in was only scraping by, and you could tell. If there was a corner, you’d find it had been cut.
As a result, overhanging all of this was an air of quiet desperation. Bar owners would be all smiles when they greeted you or when they thought you could hear, but as soon as they were out of sight the arguments would start again with their staff and family. Chatting to the manager (who was ex-Greek army and appeared rather too familiar with the internal details of the Military junta who used to run the country for me to be entirely comfortable) he informed me, several times, and angrily, that if there’s any attempt to enforce home repossessions for non-payment of mortgages there’d be a civil war and uprisings. I’m not sure he’s not right, either.
If you speak to the Greeks about what has gone wrong with their country, you’ll get several different answers;
1) It’s all the Germans’ fault.
In the time we were there, I heard German being spoken perhaps once. For a country which used to be full of German tourists a dozen years ago, this is noticeable, but unsurprising. There’s a lot of hatred of the Germans in Greece. A lot.
2) Nobody bothered paying their taxes
Except me. I paid every penny I should, but nobody else did else. It was them, the other people.
3) The government bought votes by giving people jobs it couldn’t afford. Everyone was in on it.
Except me. I voted for the honest, fiscally sound party. All the other Greeks just had their hands in the till all the time though.
If you look closely, you’ll spot a pattern. No Greek thinks it was their fault. It was all the fault of all those other Greeks. You know, the dishonest, shiftless ones who played the system. Me? I’m the honest one.
As I lay on the beach, or heaved myself through the choppy sea -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
raggedhalo had challenged me to an exercise duel on Fitocracy and swimming is worth mad numbers of points – I thought about this. Apparently when the EU audited farm payments to Greece, they discovered that the paper Greece they were paying for was almost four times bigger than the real thing due to the locals repeatedly claiming for the same land over and over again. When Greece joined the Euro they didn’t so much fudge the figures as just make them up – quite literally, when the numbers didn’t meet the Euro accession criteria they simply made up different ones and wrote them in instead with the full knowledge of the EU itself. And then when the global markets decided that being a member of the Euro meant the Germans would underwrite any debt raised, the Greeks went completely bonkers; cheap credit flooded into the country at a rate that we in Britain would have though unseemly. Between 2000 – 2008, consumer credit in the UK increased 80%. In Greece it more than trebled. State and corporate liabilities increased eightfold. At the same time, tax revenues collapsed as the government used borrowing to pay for expenditure whilst pulling tax inspectors off the street in order to ensure they won elections.
For the tourist, the most obvious way this manifests itself (aside from the highly-strung taverna proprietors who – who knows? – might be like that anyway) is that everything seems surprisingly expensive. Of course, by "surprisingly expensive" I mean “It costs what you’d expect to pay in central London”: one or two pounds for a coke, two quid for a coffee, the best part of the fiver for a pint. Living where I do you get inured to these sort of prices, but in a little fishing village in a second-world country it jars. Given that the average annual pay in Greece is more than 30% lower than what it is in Britain, I expect it jars there even more so. The Greeks are wedded to the Euro because they’ve had a military junta within living memory and they think that rubbish management from Brussels is better than fellows with mirrored aviators and fancy hats with lots of scrambled egg on them driving round in tanks telling them what to do. I reckon they’re right-ish, but I don’t reckon that’s an attitude which will remain for too much longer unless there’s some noticeable improvement.
So that’s Greece for you, really. I’m sort-of glad I went. It’s one of my favourite places in the world; beautiful blue pine clad hillsides stretching down to a warm, clear blue sea filled with interesting fauna who find your large, pale body interesting enough that whenever you go swimming after a while a small school of fish start to follow you everywhere you go. At one point I spent twenty minutes quietly shadowing a sea-turtle (the only one I’ve ever seen in the wild) as it sculled it’s way around the bay. I sat on those hillsides as the evening descended and the sun fell behind the sea, and watched a gentle mist hug the trees over the valley and listened to the chanting of the Orthodox in the chapel in the valley. Archaeologists suggest that Zacynthos was part of the ancient kingdom of Ithaca, and so the thought I was sitting where Odysseus and Menelaus had walked and discussed the invasion of Troy twenty-six centuries ago was both heartwarming and a sobering reflection on the nature of time. The crisis that has engulfed Greece will pass into that mist, as all crises do.
That bit is great. What’s not so great is that those pine-clad hillsides are dotted with ruinous hotel and villa developments which went horribly wrong when the money dried up, and you, the tourist, are rather expected to pay the cost of this profligacy one overpriced cup of coffee at a time. I’ll go back, but I’ll give it a few years before I do. Maybe I’ll wait until they drop out of the Euro.
Two towns, one Greek, one Spanish, were twinned, and in the first year the mayor of the Greek town goes to visit his Spanish counterpart. The Spanish mayor takes him to his house, a delightful villa on a hill overlooking the town.
“How on earth could you afford this house on a mayor’s salary?” says the Greek.
The Spaniard waves one hand out of the window. “Do you see that bridge over the river?”
The Greek nods.
“Well, the EU gave us enough money to build a two-lane bridge, but we built a one-lane toll bridge instead and money left over was enough to build me this house.”
A year later, the Spaniard goes to visit the Greek, who is living in a huge house overlooking his town. It is luxuriously appointed with gold taps, two fast cars in the garage, and every convenience the Spaniard can think of. “How on earth could you afford this house on a mayor’s salary?” he asks.
The Greek waves his hand towards the window. “Do you see that bridge out there?” he asks.
“No.”
Long term readers might have noticed that from time to time I indicate a less-than-positive opinion of Gordon Brown. He is, I periodically suggest, the economic equivalent of Jimmy Savile and he regarded the British economy in much the same light as Jimmy regarded the children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. However, as my car whizzed past row upon row of boarded up and closed shops on my recent trip to Greece I got to wondering; perhaps I was being too harsh on Gordon? Perhaps he was no worse than an economic Stuart Hall or Gary Glitter? Perhaps, I thought, looking at the wreckage which the twin catastrophe of an economic collapse and an inability to devalue and default had wrought upon Greece, there was worse out there than Gordon?
You’ll be glad to know I quickly came to my senses and realized my initial opinion of Brown was entirely correct; but if you want an object lesson in just how bad things can get when the population of a country not only collude in but actively encourage their own economic destruction a trip to the Hellenes is instructive.
The she-David and I had seized what looked like a cheap holiday somewhere rather nice on a website called something like Ohgodpleasecometogreecebeforeweresorttocannibalism.com, and ended up in a development of studios and villas on Laganas Bay in Zacynthos, which according to legend is the place Odysseus set out from on his way to fight in the Trojan War. On first glance it was everything you’d expect Greece to be; gloriously sunny, a crystal-blue Aegean lapping gently against the beach, hillsides dotted with pines and olive trees interspersed with white-walled and red-roofed houses of the sort that get put on postcards and make the place one of most attractive countries in the world to visit.
It’s only when you get close up and look that you realise that perhaps half of those attractive buildings have been abandoned during the development and now sit empty, forlorn, and with “For Sale ring 983457396592” scrawled sadly on the wall in spray paint. You can date by the rings of the trees growing out of deserted driveways and between cracks in empty paving stones when the workers just walked off their jobs four or five years ago and never came back, and now, you realise, what you thought were the signs of population and prosperity are in fact shells, ruins. Once, Greek hills were dotted with the ruins of the palaces of legend. Phillip’s palace at Mycenae stands dramatically atop of cliff, and it’s like innumerable clones of this ruin have been built in imitation.
Once you’ve been there for a while, something else becomes clear. Even with the abandoned and closed buildings, Greece still has perhaps twice as much infrastructure as it needs for the number of tourists who are actually there. I was there in the height of the tourist season, and yet Tavernas and bars were all half empty; the place we stayed in had rooms for a hundred people, but at no point were there more than thirty or forty actually present, and that story seemed to be true wherever you went. I got friendly with the hotel manager whilst we were there and he told me that he also ran another hotel which was being closed because it was losing money hand over fist. The one we were staying in was only scraping by, and you could tell. If there was a corner, you’d find it had been cut.
As a result, overhanging all of this was an air of quiet desperation. Bar owners would be all smiles when they greeted you or when they thought you could hear, but as soon as they were out of sight the arguments would start again with their staff and family. Chatting to the manager (who was ex-Greek army and appeared rather too familiar with the internal details of the Military junta who used to run the country for me to be entirely comfortable) he informed me, several times, and angrily, that if there’s any attempt to enforce home repossessions for non-payment of mortgages there’d be a civil war and uprisings. I’m not sure he’s not right, either.
If you speak to the Greeks about what has gone wrong with their country, you’ll get several different answers;
1) It’s all the Germans’ fault.
In the time we were there, I heard German being spoken perhaps once. For a country which used to be full of German tourists a dozen years ago, this is noticeable, but unsurprising. There’s a lot of hatred of the Germans in Greece. A lot.
2) Nobody bothered paying their taxes
Except me. I paid every penny I should, but nobody else did else. It was them, the other people.
3) The government bought votes by giving people jobs it couldn’t afford. Everyone was in on it.
Except me. I voted for the honest, fiscally sound party. All the other Greeks just had their hands in the till all the time though.
If you look closely, you’ll spot a pattern. No Greek thinks it was their fault. It was all the fault of all those other Greeks. You know, the dishonest, shiftless ones who played the system. Me? I’m the honest one.
As I lay on the beach, or heaved myself through the choppy sea -
raggedhalo had challenged me to an exercise duel on Fitocracy and swimming is worth mad numbers of points – I thought about this. Apparently when the EU audited farm payments to Greece, they discovered that the paper Greece they were paying for was almost four times bigger than the real thing due to the locals repeatedly claiming for the same land over and over again. When Greece joined the Euro they didn’t so much fudge the figures as just make them up – quite literally, when the numbers didn’t meet the Euro accession criteria they simply made up different ones and wrote them in instead with the full knowledge of the EU itself. And then when the global markets decided that being a member of the Euro meant the Germans would underwrite any debt raised, the Greeks went completely bonkers; cheap credit flooded into the country at a rate that we in Britain would have though unseemly. Between 2000 – 2008, consumer credit in the UK increased 80%. In Greece it more than trebled. State and corporate liabilities increased eightfold. At the same time, tax revenues collapsed as the government used borrowing to pay for expenditure whilst pulling tax inspectors off the street in order to ensure they won elections. For the tourist, the most obvious way this manifests itself (aside from the highly-strung taverna proprietors who – who knows? – might be like that anyway) is that everything seems surprisingly expensive. Of course, by "surprisingly expensive" I mean “It costs what you’d expect to pay in central London”: one or two pounds for a coke, two quid for a coffee, the best part of the fiver for a pint. Living where I do you get inured to these sort of prices, but in a little fishing village in a second-world country it jars. Given that the average annual pay in Greece is more than 30% lower than what it is in Britain, I expect it jars there even more so. The Greeks are wedded to the Euro because they’ve had a military junta within living memory and they think that rubbish management from Brussels is better than fellows with mirrored aviators and fancy hats with lots of scrambled egg on them driving round in tanks telling them what to do. I reckon they’re right-ish, but I don’t reckon that’s an attitude which will remain for too much longer unless there’s some noticeable improvement.
So that’s Greece for you, really. I’m sort-of glad I went. It’s one of my favourite places in the world; beautiful blue pine clad hillsides stretching down to a warm, clear blue sea filled with interesting fauna who find your large, pale body interesting enough that whenever you go swimming after a while a small school of fish start to follow you everywhere you go. At one point I spent twenty minutes quietly shadowing a sea-turtle (the only one I’ve ever seen in the wild) as it sculled it’s way around the bay. I sat on those hillsides as the evening descended and the sun fell behind the sea, and watched a gentle mist hug the trees over the valley and listened to the chanting of the Orthodox in the chapel in the valley. Archaeologists suggest that Zacynthos was part of the ancient kingdom of Ithaca, and so the thought I was sitting where Odysseus and Menelaus had walked and discussed the invasion of Troy twenty-six centuries ago was both heartwarming and a sobering reflection on the nature of time. The crisis that has engulfed Greece will pass into that mist, as all crises do.
That bit is great. What’s not so great is that those pine-clad hillsides are dotted with ruinous hotel and villa developments which went horribly wrong when the money dried up, and you, the tourist, are rather expected to pay the cost of this profligacy one overpriced cup of coffee at a time. I’ll go back, but I’ll give it a few years before I do. Maybe I’ll wait until they drop out of the Euro.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-11 08:21 pm (UTC)