Greece election: EU and Germany firm on Athens bailout

[dmallind]

28. apples and ...gyroscopes

Iceland did fuck all with sovereign debt, merely refused to nationalize the debts of Iceland's banks.

Greece will default on their loans, not Greek banks, without help. And sovereign debt default means no further loans means no way to meet government payroll, public assistance, infrastructure spending etc beyond the abysmal ability of the Greek government to collect taxes. The only two ways to handle that are a) drop the Euro and print Weimar-level amounts of drachmae, which means you end up selling anything of value to foreigners who have more credible currency while internal inflation robs everybody not rich enough to have oodles of foreign money of their real income or b) become an insular tyranny closed off from the rest of the world. I'm sure North Korea has some nice beaches and old ruins too, but nobody goes there bringing real money for a reason.