Germany has no standing to demand Greece for repayment
Preach the gospel of truth.
Quote:
Thomas Piketty isn’t mincing words when it comes to the Greek debt crisis.
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Germany, Piketty continued, has “no standing” to lecture other nations about debt repayment, having never paid back its own debts after both World Wars.
“However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them,” Piketty said. “The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.”
Piketty criticized the “infantile” moral uprightness of Germany, whose economic success upon reunification has led it to rebuke nations like Greece for being in similarly weakened financial states as Germany itself was in decades ago.
Piketty argued that the same debt relief accorded to Germany after World War II should be granted to Greece today.
“After large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents,” Piketty said. “The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.”
They invest in bonds/stock/whatever & when they lose their money they cry & demand repayments. If you bet on a horse & your horse loses, you have no grounds to force that horse to pay you back your money
So, basically, Germany should've let Greece and the other bailed out European Nations fail? Not exactly fair to beg Germany for aid and then say "Hahahaha you got help a century ago so **** you I'm not repaying anything!!", if Germany cannot expect repayment no one should expect German aid.
Germany paid back tens of billions after the wars, it's not like it got off with no repercussions.
these countries are a mess... I would say offer this to grece, just give us back what we gave u, no interese and other ****... but I doubt they would accent even that... they want their debt to be written off, and they want more aid, well f u
