Forbes: No Grexit strengthens the Euro long-term; What does Greece bring to Europe?

Blue Represents Countries in European Union (Datastat)

Forbes reported the following by Tim Worstall:

March 1, 2015

The Absence Of Grexit Strengthens, Not Weakens, The Euro Long Term

There’s an interesting argument to be had about whether having Greece within the euro strengthens the currency or whether allowing it (or forcing it) to leave would do so.

… my own opinion is that Greece remaining in will make the currency stronger…

As long as the euro continues to be a one way system then it will be stronger than if it is seen that people can leave it. Currently there’s no legal way to leave the eurozone. Further, no one has really tested a manner in which it could be done. So, simple intertia keeps everyone thinking that it won’t be done. …

I would argue that keeping Greece in the euro strengthens it. Simply because a successful exit by Greece would greatly weaken it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/03/01/the-absence-of-grexit-strengthens-not-weakens-the-euro-long-term/

Of course, if the EU can afford to bail out Greece (and other struggling nations) that is better for the Euro as a single currency.

As far as Greece does, Greece joined the predecessor to to the European Union in 1981. Despite issues it has, notice a few things about when it joined and some of what Gene Hogberg believed that Greece brought to the European Community back then:

The world’s largest economic power expands from nine to ten — and it may not stop there. Here is the significance of Greece’s entry into the European Community.

NEW YEAR’S Day, 1981, Greece became the European Community’s tenth member.
Greece’s accession expands the Community — commonly called the Common Market — to nearly 270 million people.
Of far more significance, the EC has solidified its position as the world’s number-one economic and trading power.

First in Global Trade

   Most Americans, Canadians, Australians and others living in the Western world not directly tied into the Community’s worldwide linkages, have little comprehension of its global impact.
The gross national product of the Community is about equal to that of the United States. But the EC far surpasses the United States in foreign trade — $176 billion dollars more than America in 1979. The Community now accounts for nearly one fourth of all the world’s imports, and close to 22 percent of total exports. And this does not include trade within the Community.
Now, more than ever, much of the ocean-going portion of this trade will be transported in the holds of Common Market ships. Greece, with 4,000 vessels, is the world’s premier shipping nation. By virtue of Greek membership, fully one third of worldwide merchant-fleet tonnage will belong to the Community.

Long March for Athens

   Greece’s formal induction into the Common Market has been a long time in coming. It became an associate member in 1962. Progress toward full membership, however, stalled while the Greek military ruled the country from 1967 to 1974.
The last step along the road to full membership was reached May 28, 1979, when official papers were signed by Prime Minister (now President) Constantine Karamanlis and representatives of the nine EC countries. Mr. Karamanlis — more than anyone the architect of Greece’s Market policy — said that it was a “historical moment that marks the end of a long march and solemnly seals the fusion of our destinies with those of Europe… an unswerving belief in the necessity of a united Europe and in the European destiny of my country have at long last… found their justification.”
Greece’s entry brings both benefits and headaches to the Community and its newest member. Above all, it signals a change in the orientation of the EC. From a basically central and northern European group it now becomes one with a southern, Mediterranean posture. This new direction will be accentuated with the expected linkup, in 1983 or 1984, of Spain and Portugal.
And if Turkey becomes a full member — a distant possibility — the EC will extend to the very doorstep of the Middle East.
Greece, in her own right, is an important stepping stone to the Middle East. It is the hub for 200 American companies doing business in the region. Greece also has close ties with Cyprus, which is nearly eighty percent Greek.

Standard-of-living Gap

   The “southern cousins” knocking on the Common Market door are all considerably less developed than the EC as a whole. Greece’s gross national product is less than half that of most other members of the Community, though its growth rate has been faster in recent years. Its standard of living is roughly the same as Ireland, the Community’s previously poorest state, though it has a wider disparity of wealth between urban and rural areas.
The southern expansion of the Common Market means that Mediterranean-type agricultural products assume considerable significance. “Until now,” reports Europe, a semiofficial publication of the EC (July-August, 1979, issue), “the Community has been dominated by northern European economic interests, especially those of cereals and dairy farmers. In the future, much more attention will be paid to the interests of Mediterranean wine, citrus and olive oil producers.”
Agriculture is of supreme — almost inordinate — importance to the Common Market. Agricultural price supports — which Greece’s 660,000 farmers will now benefit from — consume nearly three fourths of the EC’s annual budget.
Nearly all talk about the Common Market bureaucracy centers around its controversial Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which, critics say, is nothing but a bottomless pit in which the EC members pour more and more of their revenues.
The German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, June 14, 1980, commenting on the gradual assimilation of the three wine-and-oil producers (Greece, Spain, Portugal), noted that future wine surpluses alone are likely to amount to between five and ten million hectoliters (130 million to 260 million gallons) a year.
Olive oil production is another potential surplus problem. Nearly fifty percent of all Greek farmers are olive oil producers. And in Spain, two million farmers are engaged in olive oil production.
Thus, in addition to the Common Market’s already embarrassing butter, powdered milk, beef and tomato “mountains” can be added the prospects of overflowing wine and olive oil “lakes.”

Still, Greeks Want In

   The government of the EC’s newest member is aware of the traumas its economy can expect, especially in manufacturing. Greece’s industry is predominantly small scale, most of it consisting of only one to four people. For this reason, its industrial sector will have a grace period of five years to gradually adjust to the EC tariff structure and expected competition.
According to public opinion polls, most Greeks appear to be in favor of the EC link. Many are philosophical about the changes and challenges. They feel they are at last “joining Europe,” which they are a part of geographically, of course, but not until now as a state of mind. Newspaperwoman Helen Vlachos, editor and publisher of Kathimerimi in Athens, wrote:
“The Greek people have a deep wish to belong at last to a group, to a family of familiar countries. And Europe is the one and only that qualifies for that part. Europe is… a special, admired, envied, and in many ways, an imaginary continent.”
“For better or worse,” continued Mrs. Vlachos, “Greece becomes a part of an affluent, civilized, respectable family…. Why not accept the challenge. What have we to lose?”
The board chairman of a large Athens bank adds: “Today, most Greeks probably feel that if the Community had not already existed for them to join, they would have had to invent it for that purpose. And is there, indeed, any other alternative? Greece does not want to become a communist country, neither does it have the economic clout of countries like Sweden or Switzerland enabling it to ‘go it alone.’… Going European for Greece also means helping to make the dream of a politically united Europe come true.”
Common Market officials, in turn, are very pleased over Greece’s accession (though not a few have reservations about negotiations with the Iberian countries).
“The entry of Greece into the Community is a major political act that constitutes a turning point in the Common Market’s life,” said Gaston Thorn of Luxembourg, who on January 1 took over as Commission president, the EC’s chief executive post. “The enlargement of the Common Market southward is a key date in history of European civilization.”…

   The heartland countries of the EC — West Germany, France, Italy — are understandably concerned over the Community’s shift to include the poorer nations of southern Europe.
Politically, the move has advantages. A more stable Greece and Turkey helps shore up Europe’s southern flank. But many social and economic problems are expected. …

Many Tongues, One Voice

   Whatever the Common Market’s immediate future, January 1, 1981, was certainly a milestone.
The Community has grown considerably from the six charter nations who officially banded together on January 1, 1958 — France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
On another New Year’s Day, this time in 1973, Britain, Ireland and Denmark linked up. Norway also was to join on that date but opted out at the last minute.
Now Greece is in, making the Nine the Ten. Spain and Portugal may or may not join forces. One European news source predicts “monstrous difficulties” could arise in negotiations with Madrid and Lisbon, especially over agriculture.
Still, as Theo Sommer, the editor of West Germany’s prestigious weekly, Die Zeit, editorialized: “The new European idea has taken root despite all the workaday squabbles about nuts and bolts, chicken feed and oranges…. ”
The Common Market’s component parts will not disappear, conc1udes Sommer, “nor will national governments dwindle into insignificance…. Yet in the eyes of the outside world, the Community will more and more assume the character of a single entity, speaking in different tongues but with one voice, and implementing a collective will.”

Global Reach

   The Community exerts influence far beyond its European confines, both politically and economically.
More than 100 nations maintain accredited representatives at the Commission headquarters in Brussels.
In the economic field, the EC has negotiated commercial or association agreements with more than ninety countries around the world. Its most important trade-and-development assistance tie-up is with fifty-seven small countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. This is known as the Lome Convention, named after the capital of Togo in Africa where the accords were signed in 1975 and 1979.
The Lome Convention guarantees free access to the Common Market for 99.5 percent of the so-called ACP (Africa-Caribbean-Pacific) countries. The real significance of the Lome pact is that the links of the fifty-seven ACP countries are with Brussels, not the individual European countries of the EC.
Recently the EC also signed a non preferential trade agreement with the five-nation ASEAN trade group in Southeast Asia.
The Communist world too is increasingly coming to terms with the Common Market. The EC carries on more than four times as much business with Communist countries as does the United States.
The Soviet Union itself is loath to deal with the EC as a bloc, preferring nation-to-nation contacts. Thus relations between the Community and the Moscow-based East European COMECON group are frosty.
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1980, independent-minded Romania signed its first full trade accord with the Community. The pact was regarded on both sides as economically important and politically symbolic. Romania has been developing contacts with the EC since 1972.
Also in 1980, Yugoslavia entered into far-reaching negotiations for a new and novel cooperative agreement, which, if accepted, would give Belgrade a status equivalent to associate membership.
With Greece in the Market, Yugoslavia will now be bordered by two EC members (Italy to the northwest).

Like Babylon of Old

   Your Bible predicts that there will arise a great world-encompassing economic-political bloc at the close of our age — just before the ushering in of the Kingdom of God. It is spoken of in the book of Revelation as “Babylon.”
Significantly, The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the EC’s expanding linguistic difficulties said, on January 12, 1981, “An official market report has warned that the babel could become so great as to be unmanageable.”
The thirteenth verse of Revelation eighteen draws attention to two products traded in this coming “Babylon”: oil and wine — both sure to be in abundance very soon.
And verse seventeen tells of the far-flung ocean-going trade of this colossus, referring to “all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea.”
Ultimately ten nations, or groups of nations, will dominate the heart of this system (Revelation 17:12). As to which ten, we must still wait and see. Events now occurring in Poland and Eastern Europe may lead to some of those nations joining forces with the West. …
Greece’s membership in the European Community is important primarily for the commercial resources she brings to it — not because she has become the tenth member. (Hogberg G. Milestone for Europe: GREECE JOINS COMMON MARKET. Plain Truth, March 1981)

There have been issues with Greece becoming part of the European Community, now called the European Union. Its manufacturing has been affected and it is more of a lower tier member of the EU. Greece is also home to many of the Greek Orthodox, a group that will ultimately support the Church of Rome.

For historical and prophetic reasons, Greece will be a supporter of the final Beast power that will arise in Europe. At least two of the empires mentioned in Daniel 7 included all or part of Greece. Greece is on the ‘Great Sea’ (Daniel 7:2; which is the Mediterranean Sea according to other scriptures) and the final Beast power is called the Beast from the sea (Revelation 13:1).

I have written for years that there could be problems with the Euro, and that it even could get replaced. No matter what happens to the Euro, the reality is that something is being built in Europe.

There will be problems in Europe (Daniel 2:41-43), but after some reorganizations it will arise (Revelation 17:12-13). And it will include Greece.

Some items of possibly related interest may include:

Europa, the Beast, and Revelation Where did Europe get its name? What might Europe have to do with the Book of Revelation? What about “the Beast”? Is an emerging European power “the daughter of Babylon”? What is ahead for Europe? Here is a link to a video titled: Can You Prove that the Beast to Come is European?
European Technology and the Beast of Revelation Will the coming European Beast power would use and develop technology that will result in the taking over of the USA and its Anglo-Saxon allies? Is this possible? What does the Bible teach? Here is a related YouTube video: Military Technology and the Beast of Revelation.
Must the Ten Kings of Revelation 17:12 Rule over Ten Currently Existing Nations? Some claim that these passages refer to a gathering of 10 currently existing nations together, while one group teaches that this is referring to 11 nations getting together. Is that what Revelation 17:12-13 refers to? The ramifications of misunderstanding this are enormous.
World War III: Steps in Progress Are there surprising actions going on now that are leading to WWIII? Might a nuclear attack be expected? Does the Bible promise protection to all or only some Christians? How can you be part of those that will be protected? A related video would be Is World War III About to Begin? Can You Escape?
WTO/TTIP and the Babylonian Beast Will international trade agreements like WTO/TTIP/CETA lead to the fulfillment of end time prophecies concerning the Babylonian Beast power that the Book of Revelation warns against? What does the Bible teach? A related video would be WTO Trade Deal and the Rise of the European Beast Power.
Is Russia the King of the North? Some claim it is. But what does the Bible teach? Here is a link to a video, also titled Is Russia the King of the North?
Who is the King of the North? Is there one? Do biblical and Roman Catholic prophecies for the Great Monarch point to the same leader? Should he be followed? Who will be the King of the North discussed in Daniel 11? Is a nuclear attack prophesied to happen to the English-speaking peoples of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? When do the 1335 days, 1290 days, and 1260 days (the time, times, and half a time) of Daniel 12 begin? When does the Bible show that economic collapse will affect the United States? In the Spanish language check out ¿Quién es el Rey del Norte? Here is a link to a video titled: The Future King of the North.
Germany’s Assyrian Roots Throughout History Are the Germanic peoples descended from Asshur of the Bible? Have there been real Christians in Germanic history? What about the “Holy Roman Empire”? There is also a You-Tube video sermon on this titled Germany’s Biblical Origins.
Germany in Biblical and Catholic Prophecy Does Assyria in the Bible equate to an end time power inhabiting the area of the old Roman Empire? What does prophecy say Germany will do and what does it say will happen to most of the German people? Here is a link to a video Is the USA Pushing Germany to Start WWIII?
Anglo – America in Prophecy & the Lost Tribes of Israel Are the Americans, Canadians, English, Scottish, Welsh, Australians, Anglo-Saxon (non-Dutch) Southern Africans, and New Zealanders descendants of Joseph? Where are the lost ten-tribes of Israel? Who are the lost tribes of Israel? What will happen to Jerusalem and the Jews in Israel? Will God punish the U.S.A., Canada, United Kingdom, and other Anglo-Saxon nations? Why might God allow them to be punished first? Here is a link to the Spanish version of this article: Anglo-América & las Tribus Perdidas de Israel. Information is also in the YouTube sermons titled Where are the Ten Lost Tribes? Why does it matter? and British are the Covenant People. A short YouTube of prophetic interest may be Barack Obama and the State of the Apocalypse.
Barack Obama, Prophecy, and the Destruction of the United States-Second Edition for Second Obama Term This is a 160 page book for people truly interested in prophecies related to Barack Obama and the United States, including learning about many that have already been fulfilled (which the book documents in detail) and those that will be fulfilled in the future. It also has a chapter about a Republican choice. This book is available to order at www.barackobamaprophecy.com. The physical book can also be purchased at Amazon from the following link: Barack Obama, Prophecy, and the Destruction of the United States: Is Barack Obama Fulfilling Biblical, Islamic Catholic, Kenyan, and other America-Related Prophecies? What About Republican Leaders? Second Edition for Second Obama Term.
Barack Obama, Prophecy, and the Destruction of the United States-Second Term-Amazon Kindle edition. This electronic version is available for only US$2.99. And you do not need an actual Kindle device to read it. Why? Amazon will allow you to download it to almost any device: Please click HERE to download one of Amazon s Free Reader Apps. After you go to for your free Kindle reader and then go to Barack Obama, Prophecy, and the Destruction of the United States-Second Term-Amazon Kindle edition.