From July 3, 2015: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greeces-debt-burden-the-truth-finally-emerges http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greeces-

From July 3, 2015: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greeces-debt-burden-the-truth-finally-emerges http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/greeces-debt-burd... 'As long ago as 2010, when Greece was first bailed out, many knowledgeable observers, including some members of the I.M.F.’s board of directors, worried that Greece would never be able to pay back all of its debts—its total debt burden is about a hundred and seventy five per cent of the country’s G.D.P.—and advocated imposing a haircut on its creditors. Rather than doing this, the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the I.M.F. loaned the Greek government money to pay its creditors, which were mostly European banks, at a hundred cents on the dollar. In the now-famous words of Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, the bailout “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”' It's true that later in 2012 there was a "haircut" (as the article states) but that should have been done as part of the 2010 agreement. The funds paying off the banks in 2010 became part of government and government agency debt not covered by the haircut of 2012. They should have made the banks take the haircut in 2010 and thus the taxpayers would have been held accountable for far less debt.