Greece under Attack

(Το ακόλουθο κείμενο δημοσίευσε ο καλός μου φίλος και σύμβουλος επενδύσεων Απόστολος Κωνσταντινίδης)

During the last three months financial markets witness an unprecendented attack on Greece's sovereign debt, which makes a total of 3 % of the Eurozone's total outstanding public borrowing. It is true that Greece's public sector needs an iminent overhaul and I believe this is exactly what is happening. The country will be in a much better financial condition six months from now, but I am not sure about the fate of barbarian-style speculative capital betting huge amounts of money on the country's bankruptcy. Greece has a lot of hidden capabilities and resources, many of them intellectual; and - just to mention - a long tradition of defeating barbarians. To cheer up some my friends here in Athens who were in an unpleasant disposition this morning, I have chosen the introduction of one of my favorite classic books titled The Greek Genious and its Meaning to Us written by Sir Richard W. Livingstone, a British professor in 1912:"Europe has nearly four million square miles; Lancashire has 1,700; Attica has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Poiltics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history - these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools. Roman orators learned their trade from Greek rhetorians. Roman proconsuls on their way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the Academy and Lyceum. Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers to live in their families.... Then for a time Greek influence on the West died down. An intellectual and political system repugnant to its genius mastered the world, and Hellinism, buried in Byzantine libraries and imprisoned in a language that Europe had forgotten, seemed to have finally passed away. A few centuries go by; suddenly we find Italy intoxicated with the Greek spirit, as with new wine; poring over it, interpreting it, hopelessly misunderstanding it; leaving Pre-Raphaelite atr in order to dig up its broken statues, forgetting the magnificent monuments of Gothic architecture in order to imitate its Parthenon, deserting Dante in order to hunt for its crabbed manuscripts, at the expense of fortune and of life. Even then the revivifying power of Hellenism was not spent nor its work done."