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Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
macsga
on 12/02/2015, 09:47:31 UTC



@Mota:
It's nice of you not mentioning about the German WW2 reparations, because THERE WERE NOT ANY!


Take a good look at this picture. It's from 1953 where the second man from the left is the late Konstantinos Karamanlis. This man together with the leaders of 20 countries have signed off the "biggest since the Weimar era haircut" since Germany couldn't afford to pay its debt to those countries.

Germany has the OBLIGATION to remember that its growth and prosperity is based on the graciousness of its opponents to rub 50% of its enormous debt towards them. So please take this in mind and get your (historical) facts straight before start bashing (something you enjoy as a German, since you've mentioned it yourself).


Sigh... You really should freshen up on your history. We have absolutely no obligation to remember anything. You should read up on the cause of the rise of the nsdap before the second world war and the founding of the third reich. One of the causes was the issue of reparations for the first WW. The amount was huge (like mentioned before). Also there was no graciousness involved at all after WW2, there was simply no way a destroyed and divided country like Germany with nearly no industry left could have handled that amount of debt - Instead we paid the debt over time - and we still pay.
Germany paid off all the debts from WW1 in 2010 - 90 years after the war. For WW2: We still pay more than 500 Million € per year "Wiedergutmachung des Bundes" - google it. And those are not even the reparations, that is only for the victims (direct and indirect ones).

I told you I did not want to go into detail over WW2 because it was complicated, did you read that? Obviously not, so I will make it short and sweet: GDR paid ~200B € until 1953, West Germany paid ~4B€. The USSR dismantled nearly all of East Germanys infrastructure after the war and shipped it back to Russia. More than 3 Million Germans were used for forced Labour. The Allies confiscated significant values of German patents, copyrights and trademarks. Some of the German territory was annexed and incorporated into Poland.  

You see, we Germans don't bash someone for nothing, some of you Greeks cry out because of your governments austerity policy - we Germans live under it for the better part of 15 years. Massive social reforms and privatisation - do you think we liked it? No, we did not. Was it necessary? Indeed it was.
Your problem is, again, not the debt to the EU - you don't even have to pay back anything until 2019 iirc, and the interest is very low. Your problems are the private debts. And the lack of ability of your past Government to execute reforms and to collect taxes from the rich Greeks, which had free reign for so long that it's nearly impossible now to find the hidden banking accounts.

On the first comment from you:
How's that different from where's Greece is at, at the moment?

On the second comment:
This is a bit different from my perspective. We agree there were some forced labour and the East Germany has been suffering for way too long, but please refresh my memory: What exactly happened when the West Germany absorbed them after the joint? Capitalism over Communism happened. Companies were liquefied for literally next to nothing and the people were in a state of slavery for more than 10 years by the "new" companies that took over.

"We agree to disagree" said Schaeuble to Varoufakis. "We didn't even agree that we disagree" he replied. That's what is great in Democracy. Everybody has the right to say his thesis - nobody has to agree with it though.