After reading the book I mentioned in my last comment, I'm not convinced that the euro is really such a good idea, especially for countries like Greece. It mean

After reading the book I mentioned in my last comment, I'm not convinced that the euro is really such a good idea, especially for countries like Greece. It means that the only tool available to the government is fiscal policy. It also means that Germany effectively makes monetary policy on behalf of the rest of Europe, and so you can only imagine who the monetary policies benefit. So yes, ushering Greece out of the eurozone might not have been a terrible idea. And I do think the Germans should be asked to help clean up the mess they were (partially) complicit in creating. There is plenty of blame to go around, no one is innocent. For every euro someone borrowed that they couldn't afford to pay back, someone lent a euro to someone who couldn't afford to pay it back. It was pretty clear we were in a terrible bubble years before it burst, but the market apparently assumed there would be a bailout, so things got much worse than they needed to. Also keep in mind that the reason Greece (and Ireland, and Spain...) had so much government debt is that they transferred private sector debt onto their balance sheets. So what I would really would have preferred is to just let the owners of all those underwater banks take the hit and keep the government out of it except for making sure no one ended up starving to death (the usual social safety net stuff). I guess you could put me in the "bail out Main Street, not Wall Street" camp. But Germany didn't want that, because ultimately the money came from German banks, so... While they were violating Greek sovereignty they could have asked for much more productive changes than they did (like the mis-regulation problems you mentioned, which I agree with). But they didn't. So who gets the blame? Germany, the ECB, the EC, and the IMF. The IMF has already admitted their terrible mistake (we'll see if they learn their lesson, doubtful), the others can apologize by working with the new Government to slash the debt so that the Greek people can at least start trying to fix the other problems we've identified.