Most of it was due to the fact that Greece had forged their nation accounting to falsify their actual state and hide sovereign debt, and once they faced bankruptcy they had no alternative than to come clean and straighten their accounting.

Another important fact that is oddly left out by proponents of the "austerity is a conspiracy" rhetoric is the fact that EU's national accounting reform kicked into effect in 2014, and included anti-accounting engineering measures which were highly abused to artificially inflate GDP and mask sovereign debt.

> it and was forced into austerity by the Troika

This conspiracy theory is absurd, as it weirdly imits the fact that member-states that underwent bailout processes had already exhausted their own access to sovereign debt markets resulted from their own financial and economic colapse, and the ECB/EU/IMF trio were quite literally the last people in the whole world willing to lend emergency funds that helped them soften the blow of the problem these countries' governments created to themselves over the years.

You're getting emotional and in the process trying to out words into others people's mouths for no good reason. Greece's problems were a political and institutional problem, and it's not possible to hide this fact and its consequences. You cannot have a string of governments patently and systematically committing state-wide accounting fraud, and even resorting to paying consultants to optimize their fraud, and still try to spin it as emotional pettiness. Eventhough the actual Greek people had to bear the blunt of the problem, that changes nothing with regards to the problem, what caused it, andwho were responsible for it.

Here, check out this graph, which rather obviously shows the benefit of joining the EU in 1981: https://www.google.com/search?q=greece+gdp&oq=greece+gdp&aqs...

But when push came to shove in 2008, the debts were exploding not in Germany, but in Greece.

And this is where you're wrong. Borrowing money has a direct and deep impact on ta country's level of production, mainly because that cash is dumped on the economy by spending it on buying goods and services.

The real "fair" solution would be: to auction off their sovereign territory to the highest bidder, and paying off debt with that cash. If they try to object, confiscate their merchant fleet and block ports with aerial minelaying.

Because all the actions that took place "to fix" Greece was in order to fix the problem of the public debt. So, I suppose that now, after all the "hard medicine" the problem is solved. Well, it's not and it's not predicted to be in the future.

So, what was all this about?

None of the predictions made at the time by all those hardliners in Germany and company have become a reality. Of course, the guilt is going to be again on the Greeks. Then they will complain when the people turn anti-European and rationalistic.

That assertion is quite wrong and fly in the face of facts and history.

For example, Greece received a massive debt pardon which whiped out about half the state's debt toward private banks. This alone triggered the bankruptcy of a bunch of private banks, including from other countries also undergoing bailout processes of their own.

Additionally, the bailout process was focused on controlling structural deficit, and not debt. Debt is not the problem, but depending on loans just to keep the state operating is a collosal problem. After Greece's accounting fraud was blown, Greel governments were forced to face the problem of the Greek state enduring double digits deficits. "Austerity" is just a fancy word for "we need to reign in all this overspending", and it boggles the mind how the fact that Greece was routinely spending over 10% of it's fiscal revenue, resorting of loans after loans to cover the difference, is simply omitted or glanced over.

I think this isn't going to get fixed until the debt between nations will not be given against some specific collaterial with understood and universally accepted means of taking it regardless of sovereignty. I.e. don't give money to those stronger than you, and be ready to take it back at gunpoint.

> Should state elections in Mississippi drive US Fed policy?

EU is not a Federal Country, not a State and most of all not a Nation. It's just a common table where each country fights for their interests and the biggest state try to eat all the others not caring about its level of export.

What??

This is a comparison of Italian GDP between 1929 crisis, IIWW and 2007 crisis.

Definitely they didn't go down like IIWW but they didn't bounce either, so in the long term far more growth has been destroyed.

Should we force the (next generation of) citizens of Mississippi (who didn't personally lie about anything) to pay all this debt for the next 50 years?

Due to these uncertainties, and undoubtedly also to pressure from the rest of the EU, Greece decided instead to renegotiate their debt with the Trojka.

Now that the debt has been turned from public to private, it might be easier to handle as a situation, but I doubt the EU is able to handle such a crisis gracefully.

Greece is stuck to a never-ending extend and pretend program which will effectively kill the Greek economy in the 21st century.

:-)

Make no mistake, such a process would present a challenge for any government.