History Repeats in the Greek Crisis
 |
By Ian Morris
"Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!" So said the poet Byron
in the 1810s, little knowing that in the 2010s Greece's departed worth
would be measured in the hundreds of billions of euros.
While I was in my 20s I spent
well over a year in Greece, mostly on archaeological excavations. I then
took a long break, but in December 2009 I found myself back in Athens
to give a lecture. While I was there, Prime Minister George Papandreou
publicly admitted that the previous government's lies about the size of Greece's debt
had been much worse than anyone had realized. That year's deficit, he
conceded, stood at 12.7 percent of gross domestic product, more than
four times what the eurozone allowed. The Greek stock market fell by
nearly 10 percent in the next two days; all the major ratings agencies
downgraded Greek debt; and the long Greek nightmare began.
