>>> There are heated discussions back and forth, but the real truth of course lies somewhere in the middle. Yes the Greek did make an entire mess off there economic bookkeeping. OTOH, if the EU really want to help them, you have to give them a realistic chance to ever recover and pay back. Unfortunately this objectivity and the will to find a constructive solution seems to be rare amongst the public.
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>>I think the public opinion is closer to the true state of matters than the convoluted statements of the politicians trying to justify and sell their actions
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>The convoluted statements of politicians is just the outside shell and a way to sell it to the public. There is a lot what they do not tell.The situation is utterly complex as the parties who provided the funding of loans in the past want to make money on it as well. Any cent being earned in Greece will go directly abroad while it is better to keep that in the country to build up the economy. This way, just as IMF said, there is not a realistic chance of ever recovering from it.
>
>I think there are quite a few publications on the topic that describe the topic in more details. But for a politician to be too nuanced, is like digging you're own grave.

I do know some points, which both sides conveniently leave out - large prt of the outstanding loans to the greek state is already held by the ECB. For theses bonds, which were bought in part at prices much lower then their nominal value, Varoufakis is also calling for a haircut. Current ECB policy is to transfer all profit (interest accumulated plus "windfall" profit of low buying price) to Greece - in essence mirroring first vulture hedge funds, but giving ALL profit gained to Greece when Greece does follow the the agreed upon program (which *was* dictated, but bargaining for help also makes small sense).

In effect such policies give Greece the haircut - percentage wise in the height of the discount the ECB got at buying time. The loss was realized at the previous owner(s), who paid full/higher price earlier. For those bonds, the discussion is NOT about debt being to high, but about getting the leverage away from the ECB (and IMO carrying on as before). And yes, I think Greece leaving the Euro would be better long term: I argued for that in 2010 and 2012 - buffering banks in each nation plus giving some real help to Greece instead of throwing everything together in packages easier to confuse voters with.

Another point: Bonds similar to those famous Argentinian issued under US law, which were bought by US vulture funds and brought before US courts, were issued by Greece and ***by law*** not part of the haircut of 2012. Such papers were held by failing HRE, sequestered into a bad bank (with the taxpayer having to foot missing funds) but sold back to Greece at haircut prices, citing "market value" for the politically motivated transaction. Real vulture funds wanted to pay higher prices, but as bad bank was handled by personal under the control of german ministry of finance, higher, politicaly motivated losses were accepted, as they were no ***direct*** bailout...

It clearly is only a shell game, where probably most players do not have "correct" spreadsheets, but trying to discuss without such numbers and behind closed doors at least makes me angry (at both sides, probably more at the greek side - but more for
the "original sin" of fudging numbers from getting into the Euro, carrying on the deception for many years and trying to blackmail since having to confess
than
the amount gone down the drain).

Also basing all statistics of the bad influence of austerity measures on years where such scale dimensions were heavily skewed by the effect of getting (fraudulent?) access to cheap money. Calculate on 1995 data, perhaps aim for a correction factor for common time effects witnessed in surrounding economies - but describe such a correction calculation in detail.

@Dragan: all Varoufakis blogs I read (spot checking into the early years) left me with a demagogic aftertaste, but my number appetite is above common data hunger ;-)
Did not go for his books - have you found numbers there?

Only targeting austerity IMO is a mistake, but Greece is very resilient to any attempts tax its own population better/more fair - not only compared to german citizens...