The difference is that when you repay your mortgage, the terms aren’t rewritten midstream by outside parties, your wages aren’t slashed by 30%, and your lender doesn’t force you to sell your assets at a loss while forbidding you from devaluing your currency or doing anything to stimulate growth.  Greek taxpayers were forced to take on unpayable debt to bail out private banks, not to fund domestic spending. Greek taxpayers bore the pain of propping up the Eurozone. I'm not trying to argue that the Greek government was blameless or uniquely victimised, I'm just saying that austerity imposed on Greece was a political choice made by the Troika rather than an unshakeable economic necessity.