Greece voted \u201cno\u201d in a referendum over the weekend that asked about whether to accept a specific austerity\/bailout package, but was taken as a vote on austerity in general. \u00a0I am not an expert on the topic<\/strong>, but have four comments for your, well, comments.<\/p>\n 1) It is wishful thinking to imagine that, had Greece only stayed out of the Eurozone, they could have issued drachma-denominated bonds and avoided all this difficulty by just printing more money. \u00a0Remember that these are IMF loans, not just Greece-issued debt, and the whole reason why Greece has IMF debt is that they were unable to issue bonds on their own at a reasonable interest rate, due to the overall economic situation and the fact that they had been cooking the books. \u00a0So you\u2019re \u201cwhat-if\u201d would really have to be to imagine that Greece could have not even bothered issuing bonds, but just printed money \u2014 and I don\u2019t know of any fantasy world in which a financially-shaky country just turns on the printing press to fund its government spending without ill effects.<\/p>\n 2) It\u2019s true that if they had the drachma, they could just devalue it, and hope to improve their economy via boosting their exports. \u00a0But this ought to have happened, indirectly, anyway: \u00a0that is, workers should have seen pay cuts which would have enabled companies to undercut competitors elsewhere for export goods, and to compete for more tourists in-country. \u00a0Devaluation is just a shortcut that is more invisible to workers and doesn\u2019t require their consent, but the net result is the same.<\/p>\n 3) It is, admittedly, unfair that Greece must now simultaneously deal with the influx of refugees\/migrants\/illegals from North Africa, which simultaneously burdens them economically and hampers their tourism industry.<\/p>\n 4) Here\u2019s a potential outcome that I\u2019m just going to throw out there: \u00a0Greece as a\u00a0\u201csecondary user\u201d of the Euro. \u00a0Sure, Greece justly deserves to be kicked out of the Eurozone, but would they really be able to switch to the drachma and have the rest of the world accept it as a means of exchange? \u00a0I would expect that the Euro would still be the de facto means of exchange, the local \u201chard currency,\u201d if you will, even if the Greek government issues drachmas and requires that they be accepted for payment within the country, and that, in the extreme case in which they can\u2019t compel the drachma to be accepted as having any value, they would use the Euro in a de facto manner, in the same way in which Zimbabwe and Ecuador use the U.S. dollar as its currency, with no control over monetary policy, but better than the alternative.<\/p>\n And: \u00a0yes, I feel bad for Greeks, individually (I have some Greek ancestry but no connections to anyone there), though it\u2019s clear that they tried to will their way to the lifestyle of a wealthy country without the resources to support it. \u00a0And I\u2019m also hoping that this is all resolved before, say, June or July of 2016, because my husband\u2019s travel has accrued a good number of frequent-flyer miles.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greece voted \u201cno\u201d in a referendum over the weekend that asked about whether to accept a specific austerity\/bailout package, but was taken as a vote on austerity in general. \u00a0I am not an expert on the topic, but have four comments for your, well, comments. 1) It is wishful thinking to imagine that, had Greece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n