Easy credit and membership in the EU coupled with the chronic Greed disease of equating past glory with entitlement.
Then it’s little wonder tha countries like Germany might not want to loan more money.
well, the Greeks have done that in the past (read Tom Holland's Perso-Greek wars. The Persians couldn't understand them. But as a side-note the Greeks did conquer the greatest empire (40% of the world's population) just 200 years later.... and captive Greece captured the Roman empire)
NOTE: in many countries EU money was used wisely -- in Spain the infrastructure is superb, helping it dig itself out when it does. The Spain industry is not bad, but people are still shaking themselves off socialism.
But free money leads itself to a bad disease of getting used to it and thinking one is entitled to it.
That's not only the problem in these countries but also to welfare dependents in NZ, Aus, the UK, US etc.
The Germans running Greece, cyc? That's crazy talk. While i agree with you that it would be good, can you imagine the shouts of Nazis etc.? The Germans are p*sd off that when they wanted to help the Greeks they got accusations of not having paid back stolen Greek gold
The problem is that Greece should never have been added to the Eurozone (it was fine in the EU), ditto for Portugal. Ireland and Spain qualified easily and Italy with difficulty. Italy HAD to be in the eurozone as the third largest economy in mainland europe.
The Greeks quite frankly lied, with the help of GOldman Sachs if I'm not mistaken.
NAw, I would just say that these social democrat countries are falling victim to the ‘democracy disease’, often noted on this site, of what happens when voters realize they can vote themselves largesse from the national treasury. One can say that Germany is a social democrat country too, but apparently there are different severities of the disease, and the Deutsch seem to have woken up to some extent.