'Boomerang' By Michael Lewis Makes One Thing Clear About The Greek Crisis

Philip Greenspun writes: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World ….is far more entertaining and enlightening than I’d thought and it sheds a clear light on a lot of supposedly complex and confusing current events.

For example….a 65-year-old California private sector worker does not mind paying high taxes so that a 50-year-old former fire chief can enjoy a $241,000/year public employee pension. Why then do working Germans get so angry that they have to work harder and pay more taxes so that 50-year-old Greeks can enjoy retirement? Is it simply because Germans and Greeks have less in common than the American taxpayer and the American public employee pension collector? News articles have not been helpful in answering this question.

Lewis explains that Greece wanted to join the Eurozone so that it could cut its borrowing costs, borrow a lot of money, and then distribute it among government workers and other citizens. It wouldn’t have been possible to join the Eurozone without meeting some requirements for budget deficit as a percentage of GDP and inflation, so the Greek government falsified its numbers and thereby gained entry into the Eurozone. Once in, the Greeks, sometimes aided by Goldman Sachs, continued to put out absurdly fraudulent numbers….

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/boomerang-by-michael-lewis-makes-one-thing-clear-about-the-greek-crisis-2012-6