Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Greek I consider him a jerk. He enforced capital controls due to his incompetence and his ideological approach to financing. Furthermore, he's a pathological liar. While in many occasions he had admitted the faults of the Greek economy he never took specific actions in correcting them. If it wasn't for the group of clowns that constitute the current government and gave him the keys to the economy, nobody would g…
> While in many occasions he had admitted the faults of the Greek economy he never took specific actions in correcting them. By doing what, exactly? The country was bankrupt. In such a situation, the only sensible thing to do is default. Instead, Greece will be a 3rd world country with almost no public assets, and mass unemployment for decades. Regaining competitiveness through decades of internal devaluation is, to…
The problem here was cashflow; defaulting might save you from more loan payments, although actually doing it is quite painful under international law (see Argentina). But Greece needed to take out further loans in order to meet immediate public funding needs - and defaulting would have prevented that, or made it much more expensive.
I've turned this over in my head a number of times. None of the options are particularly pleasant, but it's not a good idea to pretend that defaulting would have been trouble-free.