How misleading.

The "credit" from KfW was the german part of the bailout money. They didn't speculate in Greece, they were simple the vehicle through which the german government sent its share. Also, KfW is not a bank in the normal sense of the word. For example, you can't go there and open an account. It's a specialized government investment institute that is primarily used as a low-interest credit bank for government subsidized investment. For example, because the government wants to support renewable energy, you can get very cheap credits from KfW if you want to build solar panels on your roof.

I usually exit these discussions when people begin to argue ad hominem. You have no idea what I like, because we haven't talked about it. Also, you're wrong.

As far as the partially government-owned banks are concerned, they're not owned by the German government, but by regional governments. The national government is too much in bed with the major banks (Deutsche Bank, etc.) to run their own.

Actually not. Some of them are partially government-owned. That's a difference. It is now that all the debt is transferred to state-owned banks.

Which is basically what happened.

At the end? You want to say the LIBOR scandal was not real, courts were all wrong and banks paid out billions in fines just to avoid some bad PR?

Get back to reality. We have actual proof that these people are criminals and they they were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy in the conspiracy-theory world-domination sense, but if you doubt that there was at least one conspiracy in the criminal sense, you haven't read any news for some years.

Yes, there is a part of that as well. The german government is absolutely to blame for the whole circus and far from the innocent victim they pretend to be.

Not at all. I'm very libertarian in this. The solution is to let the fucking "too big to fail" banks fail. But if they threaten to take down the whole system, bankrupt them the way you would any other essential service: By nationalising them, letting all their shareholders pay the bill, jail the top management for endangering the economy, selling all the financial market gambling money it holds and using all its assets to pay out regular peoples accounts. Then close the whole thing down and tell the other banks that if they so much as flinch, they'll be next.

Sadly, our fear of that is so overwhelming, that we've allowed the opposite to become reality. We've weakened our governments so much that banks and corporations interfere with politics (telling governments what to do) and they are using that ability not for the benefit of society, but for their own economic beenfit and the profit interests of their shareholders and investors.

Bullshit. The loans were given under austerity conditions, i.e. orders to cut this and that and that in social services.

No, I call that we let the banksters actually suffer the consequences of a high-risk investment going wrong (after all, that risk is why the interest rate is so high) and send the money to Greece not to french and german banks with Greece being just a proxy.

It's even harder to see why taxpayers should pay for the gambling debt of big banks.

Iceland was the only country that did the right thing: Jail the bankers and save regular peoples' account money, not investors profits.

Here's a crazy idea: Some private corporations made a huge profit lending money at very high interest rates. Interest on credit is your payment for taking a risk (that's why there is higher interest if the risk is higher). What if - omg! - that risk actually were a risk and they would lose their money? If taxpayers did not bail them out so they can buy a 3rd yacht?

There is no conspiracy. You don't need a conspiracy when people with identical interests come together. When a crowd jumps up and screams when their team in the arena scores, there is no secret ringleader telling them when to jump and what to scream - crowd dynamics and a shared interest nicely takes care of all of that without any organisation or collusion.

Same with the banks-plundering-countries scenario. I don't think they meet somewhere to discuss the plan. But the financial markets sufficiently replace any such communication by clearly outlining where to go and where to leave. Everyone moving in the same direction chasing profits is functionally identical to everyone moving in the same direction because they agreed to do so in a secret meeting.

And, actually, the banksters are doing both. The LIBOR scandal made it clear that there in fact are criminal conspiracies in this whole mess. I still don't believe there's a big conspiracy, simply because it's not needed.

The ECB didn't, but the governments did. If they would get their heads out of their assets and understand that they're still the ones who have the tanks, they could've made an emergency law (the same way they made the bailout laws) and declare any bank that's bankrupt and "too big to fail" falling into public property with no compensation for shareholders.

At the absolute very least they should've made a law that any bank that takes bailout money will get it only in return for shares in the same value, which they can at any time buy back for that original money. That way, it would've been a zero-sum game for taxpayers whenever a bank pulls through, and a takeover in case it doesn't. Then maybe your money is gone but you now own a bank and can try to make it back.

I still believe all the politicians responsible for this nightmare should be tried for high treason and jailed for life.

In a proper world, the bank would be liquidated and all its assets sold to cover paying out those accounts before shareholders get compensated, and shareholders would pay most of the bill.

In the real world, banks have been gaming the system for so long that the actual assets they hold cover only some percents of the debt they hold. Additionally, shareholders will probably get more of their investment back than account holders will.

But it's not like we couldn't change the laws and jail the fuckers. It's just that we don't want.

You think?

How strange. It takes seconds with Google and you find a hundred newspaper articles all explaining you that all that bailout money never reached any regular greek folks. Most of it went to Greece on paper only, for one legal second, before going back to the banks to cover interest and debt payments.

Yes, Germany will bail them out. But not Greece. Germany is bailing out german banks, just in a more hidden way than before, because our government understands the people would probably not stand a second bank bailout. But this way, the greek are the evil people, not the banks or the government. Win-win.

No, the banks deserve all of the blame and then some. Lending money to someone contains an element of risk. That is the justification for getting interest on the loan. Without risk, there would be no justification for interest rates, for credit ratings, rating agencies, half the financial system would have no purpose.
You can have risk-free investment or you can have profit through interest. The banks decided they want both. They are 100% to blame, because in a proper world, Greece would have defaulted, the banks would have suffered a loss, the people who had decided to give them a loan would have had their performance reviewed and definitely not gotten any bonuses that year, and everyone else would have gone their merry ways.

That the whole thing has put the whole of Europe into a panic, new institutions get created, billions of taxpayer money is lost, half a dozen countries destroy the social systems that it took decades to build - all of that is the direct result of banks deciding to game the system, and the blame is entirely theirs.

You mean like every single one of our western countries, socialism or not? Show me the western countries that have surplus budgets. Yes, they exist. They're a small minority. Deficit spending has a very long tradition and is by no means exclusive to Greece.

The problem isn't the budget.

The problem is that far from the socialism you put up as the strawman, the very real corporate and elite socialism is bleeding government accounts dry. Billions are put into fonds to save banks that by rights should go out of business, while their bosses continue to pay themselves millions in bonuses (wasn't that meant to be extra money for good performance?) and yet for the schools and public services, we don't have money.

If you think and operate in a vacuum, yes.

Greece didn't. They suffer from the same problem that many people did when the housing bubble burst: They had been talked into spending a lot by banks offering cheap credits with promises of a glorious future. That and a considerable amount of corruption within the political elite.

Scotland most likely is not the full legal successor to the tribes of that time.

Germany, however, is. And has made a big point of it. Western Germany for decades considered itself morally superior to Eastern Germany because it announced itself loud and clear as the legal successor of the Third Reich and the Weimar Republic and basically the heir in the whole line of german states.

Can't have your cake and eat it.