Morat wrote:Why on earth would Syriza not play hardball?
The austarians and the incompetent economic aristocrats they represent are never just talking about real economics when they demand austerity and other stupid self destructive policies from victim countries. Hell real economic theory and practice has never been what they are about.
When they say that Greece must obey them or be destroyed it isn't really a warning about unsustainable debt or whatever bullshit they are wringing hands over this week.
It's an implied threat, the subtext is "defy us and WE will destroy you". That's been the threat behind a great deal of the economic "reforms" world wide that have put the world economy into such a shitty state over the last thirty years.
And the economic and austarian aristocrat class genuinely believe they have the power to carry through on the threat. They think the markets will punish their enemies because they think they control the markets. Evidence suggests they are wrong.
Take Australia. Our government defied the austarians and instead of being destroyed our economy came off pretty much the best in the western world from the GFC.
Then the political party that did that was destroyed by conservatives and their media dogs... but that was going to happen anyway so that was hardly attributable as direct punishment for their success.
The aristocrats got their local favored Australian aristocrat tools into government. They implemented austerity and attempted worse, and the economy plummeted, they themselves were punished by the market. And they are
perplexed by this event, they
genuinely believed that simply being aristocrats in power they would mean that the market which surely was controlled by other aristocrats would rain money down upon them. Seriously, early on they had snide over confident quotes saying as much, about how they didn't even need to DO anything to fix the "economic crisis" they were "left with", because
the mere act of conservatives being elected in and of itself had "put the economy on the right track" and boom times would be rolling in any second with a million new jobs created through sheer
aristocratic confidence every year! (basically direct opposite of how events played out).
So yeah. For many many years the general consensus has been that if any country commits heresy against mainstream economic theory (ie kleptocratic practices and voodoo economics) the economic aristocracy would destroy them with "market forces".
Turns out market forces don't work like that. But don't expect the incompetent aristocrats to figure that out any time soon. They've never really had a firm grasp on practical economics. That's largely part of the whole problem in the first place.