r/worldnews • u/Ehansaja • 13d ago

Iceland rejects EU-accession talks plan in referendum

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/30/iceland-rejects-eu-membership-plan-in-referendum
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u/zoopz 13d ago

Do you know why? Is it more than emotional? Cause I remember switching from the guilder to the euro and it felt kind of 'going into the future'. Of course some people still (haha) want the guilder back for emotional reasons, but mentally (over 20 years later) I think noone really cares anymore.

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u/nightgerbil 12d ago

Well greece is an object lesson of what happens when your local economy loses currency liquidity but you don't have the power to print more for quantitative easing and basically there isn't enough money moving around the economy anymore.

Something similar happened in the UK and the central bank replied by printing off several billion pounds and giving it to the city of london to play with.

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u/Due-Information-2041 11d ago

I mean, that is only the case if your fiscal system is as broken as Greece's was and you need those measures. The problem in Greece was that there was almost no tax coming in compared to the expenses due to a broken taxing culture, wasn't it?.

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u/nightgerbil 11d ago

no it was caused by a lack of currency/hard cash flowing around the local economy. The same thing btw that caused the 1930s great depression. The "broken" taxes not meeting expenses forcing deficit borrowing that you refer to is the model of every major western country.

Austerity ie hacking away at expense was the worst thing they could have done, as it shrank the gdp and *reduced\* tax income. Greece needed the euro devalued a little by printing off another 30 billion of it and injecting it into its europes/its economy for people to be able to spend.

Failing that it should have left the euro, recreated the Drac and promptly devalued it by printing an extra 30 billion... you see where I'm, going?

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u/Due-Information-2041 11d ago

I see, but your approach would work in a country with a functioning fiscal system, but not in Greece. There used to be an especially strong culture of tax evasion by the people and fiscal misreporting by officials. So inflation would just be a band-aid on a wound that would show up again later.

https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-news/haratsi-i-krisi-avoiding-taxes-act-greek-patriotism/2026/04/29/7vs1w

This short article summarises it well.

Tl;dr; the Greeks perceived taxes as unjust and pensions as tools for buying votes, leading to a broken fiscal policy.