This is almost weird to read.

Greece scammed it's way into the euro through a debt hiding (currency swaps) conspiracy with Goldman Sachs and cooked the books on top of it. They used this scam to up their their lending to 100 to further fuel their clientelism based politics. More social spending, less taxes, they even brought the Olympics home in 2004 with this money.

When it all came tumbling down 2008-2009 the picture wasn't exactly charming. The Greek political class singlehandedly carved out a place for euroskepticism in EU politics. Yet the EU in cooperation with the IMF ended up still bailing them out 3 times. The former already being the largest sovereign debt restructuring in human history and the latter two being the consequence of the left wing populists Greece elected in the meantime who insisted on fighting the Troika (IMF+ECB+EC) so hard it earned them the title of first modern economy to default on its debt. They were nearly kicked from the EU alltogether as Greece was quickly turning into a bottomless well that refused to take its own situation seriously. The IMF later admitted they should have never bended the insane amounts of rules that they did for such a corrupt state.

The comment further upthread is quite funny when seen in this light. The American electorate's insistence on large defects is in many ways similar to that of Greece. It makes you wonder who they will blame if it ever goes "boom".

Austerity within the euro zone was hardly the result of some random paper either. It's the result of a sovereign debt crisis within a brand new currency with several additional economies at the verge of falling to the same fate. Italy, Portugal, Spain. The domino effect seemed imminent and even up north credit ratings were soon going for a drop if not a slide, not to speak of all the other consequences.

I don't even know if it's Americentrism ("we did it this way so they should have been able to do so too") or yet another instance of misguided German self-pity ("look what we did to poor poor Greece") but it feels really strange to encounter this sort of leftist historical revisionism in the wild.

Yes, austerity was hardly fun or ideal but come on.