Germany Never Paid; Why Should the Greeks?
Thomas Piketty became a very famous economist with his book, Capital . You can imagine how popular that book was by the fact he even gave a TED talk on it. Recently he gave an interview on the German led demand that the Greeks must pay their debts. What’s wrong about that, I wondered. Piketty’s answer: “Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. 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…The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.” Wait a minute: aren’t we taught that the punitive Treaty of Versailles on Germany was one of the root causes of the Second World War? Piketty points out that the Germans just stopped paying after a point! And after the Second World War ended,...