As far as I am aware, Greece and several other of the periphery Eurozone countries with similar debt crisis, accumulated their debt over time through a system o

As far as I am aware, Greece and several other of the periphery Eurozone countries with similar debt crisis, accumulated their debt over time through a system of credit swaps developed as financial instruments by companies including J P Morgan and Goldman Sachs, to enable perifery EU countries to hide their borrowing to make it easier to appear to be inline with the rest of the Eurozone, which was fine until the crash and the tide went out. If you were in a cynical and slightly paranoid frame of mind, it could even look like an economic attack on the Euro by US financial institutions.