My big fat Greek debt

The eurozone was a crowning achievement for many Brussels europhiles, of which they no doubt felt intense pride. As history shows again and again, it came before a fall.

To describe the overweening pride characterising the euro’s introduction in 2001, Jason Manolopoulos, author of Greece’s Odious Debt, self-consciously employs the word ‘hubris’, which stems from the Greek. It is worth reading his account of that country’s debt crisis last year, which has since rippled into other peripheral nations. Manolopoulos also shows just how many people, to borrow his words again, were “asleep at the wheel” leading up to it, and how long the lead-up actually was. If not asleep, then countless people were willfully looking the other way. Brussels politicians tu...