Greek Humour or Greek Tragdedy?

Kicking someone when they are down is cruel. Mocking them in that situation is slightly better. What follows is neither, even though it is about Greece and the mess it is in.

One guy started an online campaign to collect money to pay a teeny, tiny fraction of Greece’s debt! It didn’t collect much. I could have told him that: the Internet only donates to shady Nigerian scams!

Greece’s GDP is $250 billion; Apple alone has $280 billion in cash. Hence the jokes about Apple buying Greece and renaming things to iAcropolis and iOlives. It could then be the company sponsored vacation spot for Apple employees, they joke: Greece would be for geeks!

Greece’s stock exchanges recently reopened after being closed for 5 weeks and the banking stocks crashed because nobody has any faith in them anymore. But how little faith is best articulated by a comparison: Uber, the cab ride sharing company, alone is worth over 5 times more than all of Greece’s listed banks put together!

The lack of faith in Greek banks (plus the fear of a Euro exit) has led Greeks to withdraw much of their cash from the banks. So where do they keep it? In their homes mostly. Hence the rise in home robberies in Greece. Really, that’s happening: I kid you not.

Any country in such a scenario inevitably puts capital controls in place. In case that’s Greek to you, the term refers to government measures to restrict forex from moving out of the country. Makes sense, right? Except it has a whole lot of unintended consequences. Especially when the online economy is so global:
“Imagine trying to buy a song on iTunes, but finding your credit card payment blocked. You can’t pay your cloud storage subscription, either, even though you have the money. Apple just won’t accept your card, and you’re about to lose most of your files.”
But wait, it gets even worse:
“The infrastructure that processes payments at checkout terminals in brick-and-mortar stores is also essentially international, so Greek citizens travelling overseas could normally use their credit cards at payment terminals anywhere. But suddenly, they can’t, which means that travel outside of Greece is pretty much out of the question.”

Did you find all that funny or did it remind you of a Greek tragedy?

Comments

  1. KumarAugust 8, 2015 at 9:15 PM

    Well written. I liked your, "In case that’s Greek to you,...".

    So it appears it's all downhill for now for Greece.

    I feel sad sad that Greece, whose great epic by poet Homer lent its heroine's name to the European culture - to be precise Hellenic culture -, and knowing the glory of the ancient Greek philosophic tradition with Socrates leading the show, and also being aware that our astounding success of modern European sciences, mathematics and physics, had their clear origins in the methodology of Pythagoras, Archimedes and the like...
    One can understand the feeling, "What a fall".

    Of course it is true nobody can live on past glory, neither Greece nor Italy. Neither China nor India for that matter. We need to work towards meeting today's' challenges. Let's hope Greece too does something that saves them from this tragedy.

    ReplyDelete

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