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