Then why didn't everyone of you do it? Economic responsibility? Seriously?
I never said Greece etc. did good here. They got on the Euro and then got high on cheap credit — since at the time that was what benefited the German economy most (the ECB took more cues from what was good for Germany than, say tiny Greece and Portugal). Maybe they shouldn't have, but getting down from the run-away wage increases now involves slashing GDP on a scale that will hurt the entire EU (since currency depreciation and inflation are out) — which isn't in the German interest either. No one really cares if Greece goes down over this, it's small enough not to matter that much, but if Germany can be expected to be the only part of the EU economy that grows in the decade to come, then the EU is probably going down, and the market is jittery over that aspect, rather than over whether Greece specifically will go bankrupt or not. It's not about Greece, it's about the EU.
And we can't allow the PIIGS to just go belly up. If it was the US, a lot of the people there would move where the growth and the jobs are — in this scenario quite possibly Germany. Is Germany expecting to take in large sections of the Greek, Portugese, Spanish etc. workforce in the years to come?
While that is true, you can't hold Germany responsible for letting in a country into the Eurozone that was obviously not able to economically cope with its new strong currency in the first place.
No I can't. But it doesn't matter. This is about how the EU works, specifically the Eurozone, and not about Germany or Greece individually. And the real market fear right now is that, well, apparently the Eurozone isn't working. But sorting Greece out in the short term means next to nothing compared to sorting Germany out in the long term — and Germany can't go on inside the Eurozone like it has so far, since it will likely end up wrecking smaller, weaker EU members, unless as said they start racing Germany towards the bottom, bringing the EU GDP down big-time, causing recession. Power bringing responsibility and all that.
Or we just scrap the Eurozone because Germany wants to keep exporting no matter what? It was good for Germany while it lasted, but now the jig is up, and everyone fend for themselves...
As you can tell the apparent present German self-declared victim-hood doesn't sit too well with me. But the problem is really structural and with the entire Eurozone construct. Germany can still make it work for a while, perhaps enough for the Eurozone to reform itself, or bring it down.
But sure, Greece should never have been allowed to join. A coordination of financial policies from the Eurozone's inception would have been wise — though not politically possible at the time. Then otoh France and Germany shouldn't just have waived the conditions for Eurozone membership for themselves a couple of years back when they ran up budget deficits above the set level with impunity, etc...
The problem is that all member sates have looked out for Nr One, with no one sufficiently looking at the big picture, and no integration of financial policies. And while Greece has been downright fraudulent in its dealings with the rest, the German choices hasn't helped anyone but Germany. So, yeah, why should we expect more from Germany? — like accepting higher interest rates than necessary to baby the southern European economies along when they could have used it to not en up in the present mess — but then again the German power in economic matters is such that it should be expected to be aware of its own strength at least.
Because it's not as is all the PIIGS are like Greece. Spain, a rather bigger economy, ran budget surpluses for a decade and was an exemplary Eurozone member, it just got dumped on by having a overheated real estate bubble burst — with Madrid's hands often tied when it came to trying to cool things down, as it was stuck on the Euro, and the low interest rates making credit cheap Germany largely insisted on — while the global economy in general went south in 2008.
Greece in annoying and all, but much larger Spain is getting clobbered because too many people can see no way for it to climb out of the hole it suddenly got dumped into mostly through no fault of its own — but where Germany sticking to conducting its business mostly as it has done for the last decade or so pretty much dooms the Spaniards.