Pro - EU Greek Rally

[innonimatu]

I made a basic spreadsheet to see how Greece might plausibly repay its loans in a world where all its sovereign debt magically evaporates on July 1 and is replaced with a single unconditional 330 billion euro loan at an interest rate of 2.3% and a single monthly payment.

I know this is crude, but hopefully it works as a first-order approximation. Ignoring all the political bluster that appears every time Greek finances are brought up, is there any way they could possibly be solvent even with further austerity?

You didn't even had to go beyond that first paragraph. Austerity causes recession due to contraction of demand. Exports can't prevent that because devaluing only wages (the euro prevents another type of devaluation) cuts production costs very little, and every other country is trying to export its way out of an austerity-induced recession anyway. So the economy shrinks. Greece can't pay back the debt now, how could it pay back the debt under a single currency and austerity polices? And this isn't happening only in Greece. The whole EU is "economically sick", languishing or slowly perishing under german ordoliberalism.

The EU is run by madmen (and women...). The current arrangements suits the wealthy and the politicians in power very well: economic inequality keeps increasing and the usual dynamics and corrections operated in democratic regimes were temporarily overridden by spreading the false TINA ("there is no alternative") belief. But this is setting up the stage for an epic-scale lash-back. The EU is breaking up very soon because there are still elections, and people are getting very pissed off - lies only work for some years even with full control over the media, then cynicism takes over, and then a new generation with nothing to lose grows up and starts acting. Nationalist governments will be elected. And that won't solve the problems it created, only set off another iteration in European history. One of those we have every few decades and managed to do without since the forties, if you take my meaning.

Varoufakis was, alas, right. The chances of the other EU politicians realizing the kind of disaster they're creating on this continent were less than 50%. Nevertheless he tried, and failed. He expected renewed conflict and a rise of nationalists in case of failure. Not that nationalism is bad - caring for one's country is an essential condition for democracy to work - provided it doesn't lead people to irrational thought. But the future nationalist governments that will be elected to dismantle this abomination the EU has become will inherit a host of problems created by the abomination. And very likely will cross over to the irrational territory in a bad way.
It's too late now: those currently in power committed themselves, their careers, to extending an untenable situation. There is no fix, they won't recognize mistakes and sacrifice themselves, they'll rather cling to power till death. It may not yet seem so but we're going down the dark road again.