Hello Mark,

I don't know if the Latvians went through a similar situation in 2009, but Greece is in this situation for 6 years and no one feels that it's going to end anytime soon. Indeed large part of the population[1] is semi-depressed on a daily basis.

There's another part that's important to mention here: Greeks have been heavily accused of being lazy and corrupted. Of course there are lazy on corrupted people in Greece. But the majority is not like that. Indeed, I dare to say that Greeks are among the most hard-working people in Europe. No one I know works the pre-determined hours. EVERYONE works overtime, me too of course. This accusation led to a feeling of lost dignity which now SYRIZA is trying to restore.

Most Greeks don't even know when that happened, but I know... It was first the 'Karamanlis' government who initiated the myth of Greeks not paying taxes and then Papandreou went over the roof making rounds in Europe stating that he is the PM of a corrupted country in order to avoid all responsibility for non-taxing the local oligarchy.

In a sense, Greeks, deserved to be punished because we supported (as a nation) largely corrupted politicians. It's easy to blame, it's a lot more complicated in real life, but I won't bother you with details. Truth is that there are no innocents.

However, we found ourselves in a spiral of a Crisis that we didn't create, private banks did. I feel that Greece was the weakest link.

In 6 years of austerity, Greece has implemented so many reforms that no other first world country had ever made. It create a (I believe false, but whatever) surplus last year, but at a huge financial and social cost. The troika's program, led the debt (which in theory everyone wants to lower) go from 125% to 180% of the GDP. Clearly, it doesn't work for us.

From the amount received by the troika, only 11% went to Greece. The rest went to pay Greek maturing bonds held by French and German banks. Doesn't make sense to me. At the same time, Germany was selling broken submarines in Greece and military equipment. Indeed the only part of the public spending that wasn't slashed was the military spending. I assume that is because most of our military expenditures came from Germany and France.

In 2001, Greece falsified the countries stats to enter the EURO. Everyone knew. Personally I believe that many other countries did the same (Italy, Portugal and probably others). What is known now, is that everyone knew but didn't care at the time. The man who made this possible was Loukas Papademos. He acted as a bridge between Goldman Sachs and the Greek government. Loukas Papademos was A. Merkel's choice for PM after Papandreou resigned and country for some reason wasn't ready for elections. Isn't that a strange choice to make? It looks very suspicious to me to choose to work with the same people who accuse of fraud. Mostly in the same vein, Germany supported the same parties that brought Greece, financially speaking, to it's knees... Which doesn't make sense to me.

The current government is the first clean government in 40 years. It might our last chance to straight up the country.

> I'm genuinely interested in how you would ideally see Greece regain solvability.

I like Varoufakis (our new FinMin) "Modest Proposal"[2]. Varoufakis believes that, although Greece has it's fair share of problems as is, the Eurozone crisis is mostly structural. It's not a Greek problem, it's a European problem. Many renowned economists have expressed the same idea. You might be familiar with Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for example, two American economy nobel-winners, but there are many others which believe so in mainstream financial media magazines like the NYTimes, FT, WSJ, The Economist, etc.

That said, I believe that the Greek economy is a symptom. Greece has a total lack of justice estate. If the current government manages to re-structure our justice estate in order for it to break the chains of corruption, the rest will follow.

Sorry for the long response!

Take care :-)

[1] I live in a small town in North Greece. The crisis didn't strike our town as much as other major Greek cities. I work with people, elderly mostly and I get a first-hand idea of how they feel.

[2] http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/euro-crisis/modest-proposal/