[RobertoG]

Many commenters here are missing the point. All the measures that were taken against Greece (for its own good, of course), were, theoretically, about improving the competitive of Greece and solve the problem of the public debt.

Nothing of that have happened. The public debt problem has not being solved and the Greek economy is a disaster. So who is responsible for those mistakes? They failed in their predictions and their failed in their goal (if what they say in public about their goal is the truth, of course).

It seems to me that if we leave all those politicians that decide to be "hard" on the Greeks without punishment we will have a clear case of moral hazard.

[rumanator]

> Many commenters here are missing the point. All the measures that were taken against Greece

Your assertion is absurd. No measure was ever taken to "keep the Greek man down". Greek governments spent years running up a monstrous debt and cooking their books to try to falsify the actual state of the country's economy and the state's finances, going to the extent of hiring private consultancy firms to help them commit accounting fraud, and once that time bombs blew in their faces there was no other alternative than to pick up the pieces and sort out the mess. The ECB/IMF/EC gang's role was to simply provide emergency financing to buy Greek government's some time to actually sort their state's mess. It might be politically convenient to fabricate an evil foreign boogieman to distract people from the true causes but the facts speak for themselves, and there is no way around it.

[nutjob2]

The problem was that the Greeks had got themselves deeply, calamitously into debt. That the "solution" was awful or ineffective really is not relevant, since it's entirely a consequence of the former. At any time the Greeks could have said no to the proposed solution, but they didn't because they feared an even worse fate.

The responsibility for Greece's situation must stay with Greece, unless they forgo the freedom to make their own decisions (about lending money). Nothing else works or makes sense logically. Freedom and taking responsibility are two sides of the same coin.

[JackFr]

> The problem was that the Greeks had got themselves deeply, calamitously into debt.

To be clear then, any 'bailout' of Greece is truly a bailout not of Greece, but their creditors.

[nutjob2]

Not at all, that's a side effect. If what you say were strictly true, then why would Greece bother? Let the creditors burn.

Of course the reason Greece agreed is that the attendant inability to borrow after the default would be much worse for Greece than the lenders. That really goes to the heart of the situation Greece had got itself into: default would not save them.