Heartland

maybe this should be in JotD

It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.
The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub.
The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him "services" on credit.
The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note.
The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the
counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the bailout package works.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry at this point.

I found it very funny, probably cause Greece is sitting in a very deep s**t, you can either cry or laugh about it, either way you ll get f**ked...
the whole country is miserable..i prefer laughing.

At a certain point you run out of other people's money to spend.

We are all fu*ked anyway

Well at least we've got people with a reasonable degree of competence calling the shots on the economy now. Can't be a bad thing. After a year during which billions we'll never see again have been poured into trying to rescue a corrupt bank (I wonder why...) and after being lied to at every possible turn for the past month... well, bring on the IMF et al.

James Blast wrote:The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the bailout package works.

Close. What actually happened was this:

The rich tourist tells the hotel proprietor (who doesn't owe anyone anything) that he (the tourist) will help drum up business for the hotel if the proprietor will lend him €100. The tourist gives the money to the butcher et al, but when the hooker comes to give the money to the proprietor the tourist snatches it off the counter and says "Nope, that's my money now - it's my fee for saving your town."
So everyone got out of debt except the proprietor, who is now €100 out of pocket, so he ends up needing to get credit from the butcher, and the cycle starts all over again. We call this "robbing Peter to pay Paul," and it's as shonky an arrangement today as it ever was. Ask anyone who bailed out the American automakers. The rich tourist is adept at getting something for nothing, and everyone else winds up footing the bill.

mh wrote:Well at least we've got people with a reasonable degree of competence calling the shots on the economy now. Can't be a bad thing. After a year during which billions we'll never see again have been poured into trying to rescue a corrupt bank (I wonder why...) and after being lied to at every possible turn for the past month... well, bring on the IMF et al.

Well, thing is those people running the Irish economy now had a big hand in ruining it in the first place. Interest rates were set at a stupidly low rate by the ECB simply to keep Germany out of a slump. And the zombie banks like Anglo-Irish were saved because of a lot of pressure put on the Irish government by the countries whose own banks had lent Anglo-Irish etc a shedload of money. Largely the banks of Britain, France, and Germany. So I wouldn't think the ECB and the EU are Ireland's friends if I were you. They've danced to Germany and France's economic tune ever since it came into being.

Greece is simply a problem being kicked further up the road with big chunks of everyone else's money. For it to survive not only would it need to cut costs it'd also have to grow it's economy which is clearly not going to happen.

Who's next, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy or us?

mh wrote:Well at least we've got people with a reasonable degree of competence calling the shots on the economy now. Can't be a bad thing. After a year during which billions we'll never see again have been poured into trying to rescue a corrupt bank (I wonder why...) and after being lied to at every possible turn for the past month... well, bring on the IMF et al.

I don't think it'll make much difference - we've still got the same people in charge andthe the alternatives aren't great ... And the guys calling shots in Europe just care about the dollar (or rather euro) and making sure that the whole deck stays standing.

Portugal is next in line after Greece and Ireland.
The line after Portugal is Spain.
The next after Spain is Italy.
And the 2 candidates after Italy are France and Great Britain, my opinion is that this must be France and not Great Britain. Great Britain has all the tools to escape this without even go to imf.
But all this is really sad things and i would like to speak about something more funny

iesus wrote:Portugal is next in line after Greece and Ireland.

It's not getting any funnier here in Portugal... Quite sad actually, even my dad pension was reduced, a dozen of my friends were layed out by their bosses, I'm one of the lucky persons who's got away with only a 5% cut in the salary.

circle wrote: I'm one of the lucky persons who's got away with only a 5% cut in the salary.

Isn't it absolutely horrible what constitutes luck these days...

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the bailout package works.

yeah, except that the note wouldn't return in reality

Gone for less than two hours and already I miss the kroon.

Petseri wrote:Gone for less than two hours and already I miss the kroon.

My gf's grandparents live in a sort of semi-rural area outside Tallinn, in a sort of Soviet concrete cottage with no plumbing. I'm rarely allowed to speak directly to them, as Estonian sounds so much like Finnish my gf is convinced I'll end up speaking some weird hybrid language..
Am a bit concerned how the Euro's going to affect them, as they're on a fixed income anyway and one thing you can guarantee with currency changes is everything goes up in price.