Pretty amazing lack of leadership on all sides to let this degenerate into a game of political chicken with no good endings for anyone. Clearly the Greeks were

Pretty amazing lack of leadership on all sides to let this degenerate into a game of political chicken with no good endings for anyone. Clearly the Greeks were going to have an exceptionally hard time paying back their debt and certainly the Germans who were in a similar situation after WWI should have realized the depth of the problem [1]. Anyone who honestly thought that the situation would get better under the austerity program despite all economic history to the contrary should have realized a couple years in that it wasn't going to work. After a few years the debts would be even more difficult to pay after Greek GDP shrunk by 25%[2]. From my personal it seems like if Europe had really wanted to help Greece tackle their debt they should have used the crisis to change Greek laws to make it easier to start and run a business there. Currently Greece is by far the hardest country in the Euro currency to run a business as it ranks just before Russia (61 vs 62) in the World Bank's "Ease of Doing Business Index"[3]. The other economies that are held up as examples of recoveries like Iceland and Ireland rank 12 and 13 respectively. Having a monetary union without a political union is a questionable undertaking in general [4]. Given that the leaders of Europe know that they should either be working to get closer to a political union with similar laws and workings or looking for a way to gracefully exit economies that aren't working out. The current approach of bashing Greece with no real alternative to grinding economic suffering seems like the worst sort of denial about the reality on the ground. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/18/how_bad_is_greece_s_economy_these_charts_will_tell_you.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/18/how_bad_is_gr... [3] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.BUS.EASE.XQ http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.BUS.EASE.XQ [4] http://www.euro-know.org/europages/articles/rmu.html http://www.euro-know.org/europages/articles/rmu.html [5] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-st...