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[LordSlowpoke]

EU signs pacts with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

greece was a bad idea

if this goes ahead as i expect it to, it'll be borderline mentally defunct

[Dutchling]

Maybe the plan is to create a second European Union with those countries + Greece, and then completely ignore them forever.

[Sheb]

What do you mean? That's not even candidate status.

[LordSlowpoke]

What do you mean? That's not even candidate status.

yeah, partnership is tunisia-level membership

but it shows that there is political will to drag them into the union, seeing that these states were conveniently ignored by the eu beforehand (and with the exception of the ukraine, nothing really changed about them since)

i doubt that the states on the receiving end would have anything against joining and running the whole party into the ground to not say that they'll pour a giant vat of shit into the fan as a result either

[Sheb]

Well, it's the first step, but the EU is pretty clear that any European state that fullfill the criteria and wants to join can do so. In other words, integrating those states was part of the endgoal since the beginning.

Now, of course they cannot join in their current state. But that's the beauty of the accession process: it's like intense fitness training for countries. By the time they effectively join (if they decide to do so), they'll be in a much better shape.

[Dutchling]

Unless they're Greece

[mainiac]

Well, it's the first step, but the EU is pretty clear that any European state that fullfill the criteria and wants to join can do so. In other words, integrating those states was part of the endgoal since the beginning.

Now, of course they cannot join in their current state. But that's the beauty of the accession process: it's like intense fitness training for countries. By the time they effectively join (if they decide to do so), they'll be in a much better shape.

Yes politicians must practice swearing undying devotion to counterproductive economic agendas hundreds of times before they are considered fit enough to do so as EU members.

Unless they're Greece

I thought Greece was the greatest example of all.  No country has shown a greater willingness to slit their own throat in the maintenance of trade deficits.

[Sheb]

You mean the same Greece that cheated its way into the Euro?

[LordSlowpoke]

no they strictly adhered to the criteria didn't you hear?

[mainiac]

You mean the same Greece that cheated its way into the Euro?

You mean the same Euro that cheated on the monetary policies that convinced more important economies then Greece to enter?

There is a degree of uncertainty in macro-economics.  Don't focus on a mistake smaller then 20 billion euros in importance while ignoring the mistakes of thousands of billions of euros.  Greece is the welfare-fraud of European politics.  Sure they are clearly at fault but the attention paid to them is massively inordinate.  Compare that to Spain which was running budget surpluses in 2007 and was a 5 times larger economy.

[Sheb]

I don't blame Greece for the Euro's problem, but claiming Greece as a great example of why EU policies are flawed is stupid when they spent their time cheating themselves out of said policies...

[mainiac]

Correcting the Greek mistakes would have amounted to a rounding error for Greece if done humanely.  Instead it was done with huge pain to the greek people and greater pain to the rest of Europe then if the EU had just behaved like adults.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-bond-yield

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/greece-government-bond-yield.png?s=gggb10yr&d1=20050101&d2=20141231&URL2=/germany/government-bond-yield&type=line&title=GREECE


The 2010 revelation of the size of Greek debt was not what caused this crisis.  It was the revelation that the ECB cared more about blaming Greece then solving the problem over the next few years.  And while this caused aditional tens of billions of euros of damage to Greece it caused thousands of billions in damage to the rest of the world.  It's like killing the fly on your foot with a hand grenade.

[10ebbor10]

So what were they supposed to do. Pay off the entire debt using printed money? (Might make sense, but I doubt you can push this through.)

[mainiac]

So what were they supposed to do. Pay off the entire debt using printed money? (Might make sense, but I doubt you can push this through.)

Well considering that's the layman's translation (very inaccurate translation) of what they ultimately ended up doing last year after three years of footdragging and trillions of euros of damage... why not just do that in 2010 and save the bother?  When France and Spain and Italy entered the Euro it was under the implicit promise that the ECB would act this way from the start.  That's what their independent central banks would have done before they were on the Euro.  That's what the German central bank would have done before the Euro.  That's what the Japanese central bank and Russian central bank and Mexican central bank were doing while the Euro was being hashed out.

So yes, I would favor orthodox monetary policy with a track record of success being used to resolve the problem before trillions of euros of damage rather then after.

[Sheb]

I totally agree with you on that. Actually, I think we agree on pretty much everything. My point was against LSP, who was arguing that the Pacts we just signed with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia (we need a snappy name to refer to those threes. GUMs?) would wreck the EU once they join.

My argument was that the lenghty process of accession means that by the time they're ready to join, they'll be in much better shape. We're looking at at least a decade before they join, which is plenty of time to grow. And no matter what we think about the EU's monetary policy, the reforms they'll have to undertake also include stuff like fighting corruption that will help them.

After all, it is Greece, a member for 30 years that ended up causing problem (that were much worsened by bad planning and poor foresight), not any of the member states that joined in 2004.