[claudius]

With wisdoms such as:

> There were two decent solutions that would have ended this crisis within a year or two. One would have been that Greece default on its debts, paying back for example 30% of outstanding loans. Another would have been for Greece to leave the Euro Zone and go back to using the drachma (their currency before the Euro), and pay its creditors in the new currency. This new drachma would quickly fall in value as the Greek central bank would print more drachmas, making it easier to repay the devalued drachma loans.

How would defaulting on debts have solved any problems? Still nobody would have bought new Greek debt and since Greece was running at a deficit before it still would have run at a deficit, just without any additional funds. They still would have had to get their administration in order to actually collect taxes etc.

The second proposition is even more ridiculous, nobody would have bought the new debt, the Drachma would have been entirely worthless and any sort of import (of, e.g., medicine) would have been impossible.

Edit to add: And what happened of course proves that these two "alternatives" would have been ridiculous. Greece could easily have (on its own) decided to default or switch to a new currency. No outside power could force them to stay in the euro or pay their incurred debts. Yet somehow they decided against these measures and instead took the horrible low-interest loans offered to them.

[spiralx]

The Greek Government would buy the debt, assuming that we're talking about bonds. That's how you run a deficit.