25 May, 2010

Greece: the island nation

One of the reasons the EU are going to such lengths to keep Greece afloat is the extent of its foreign bondholders: that is to say non-Greeks to whom it owes money. If it only owed money to its own citizens - and this is to a large extent the situation with Italy - a restructuring of the debt would simply mean impoverishing them a bit.

But Greece owes some €340 billion abroad, enough to trigger a major financial disaster.

So if a restructuring of its debts is too much of a shock, and it can't pay them back itself, what is the answer?

It's the islands. Greece owns something like 1,400 islands in the Aegean and Ionian seas, of which only a few hundred are inhabited. They should sell them off now.

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