Greeces Economic Situation With The United States

Since 2008, the Hellenic Republic (Greece) has been suffering from one the worst economical and financial depressions in its history. From its beginning, the nation s banking system has teetered on the brink of collapse and over 20% of its citizens have been unemployed. This essay will discuss the history of the crisis, its causes, and comparative study between Greece s economic situation with that of the United States. The paper will close with my future predictions about Greece s response to the crisis based on experiences I shared with friends and family members in Greece. The crisis began alongside the worldwide recession in 2008. Preceding this worldwide economic downturn , eurozone countries experienced an 35% of GDP increase†¦show more content†¦However, despite this rapid deterioration of the worldwide economy, Greek s decrepit financial situation did not occur overnight. It was result of a flurry of factors stemming from a wide variety of sources. In Georgios P. K ouretas and Prodromos Vlamis s work, The Greek Crisis: Causes and Implications, the authors indentified at least three key players, which led to Greece s continued financial crisis (Kouretas and Vlamis, 393). The first and most responsible institution was the Greek government and its feeble political system. Throughout the years, the national government mismanaged the domestic economy to the level that the economy was adding on government debt at a rate faster than any other eurozone nation. Combined with its rapid increase was its debt/GDP ratio was already greater than 100% by the time of the crisis. In order to combat this overspending, Greece implemented tough austerity in both its fiscal and economic policies (in order to lower its budget deficit and debt/GDP ratio) while relying on 110 billion euro package, provided by the EU and IMF, to finance its short-term operations. As a consequence of its large budget deficit, the financial market downgraded Greece s credit rating to th e point that the country had to withdraw from the international bond markets (due to extremely high interest rates). The final major factor lies in the response of both Eurozone governments and the European