Hacker News Reader

Look into who they were the debtor to. Turns out that a lot of German banks would have needed to scrap debt from their books.

View on HN

So a Greek default would have created an EU political crisis. Greece would have been in the doghouse. Perhaps the other members would have suspended its structural funds, or even voting rights. Seems impossible it would have been thrown out of the EU, there's not even an obvious way to do that. All very unpleasant, but then there was clearly an upside for Greece. It just seems interesting that the scenario was never really entertained or gamed out in the media.

It was though? I remember a default being a real option in the media.

But in the end, it was clear that unlike in Iceland, bankruptcies were not considerable, and so a bailout was going to happen. The only question was how the bailout would be structured.

Yanis Varoufakis made his name back then by going against the grain and proposing a hairsplit, but instead an approach was chosen where Greece never really defaulted, but its population was harshly punished for it.

A default plus Greece unilaterally continuing to use the euro was the scenario hardly ever evoked.

Indeed so: the term “Brexit” was a comical extension of the original “Grexit” at that time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com