You didn't answer a single one of my questions that I posed so what's the point? Sounds like you're just stubborn in your beliefs despite being offered evidence to the contrary, you're like a free-market nickgusset.

I agree about writing some money off. Greece is never going to repay all the debt regardless of a deal or not so it would help if someone would own up and just admit this to get the ball rolling.

I don't.

And neither do the French, where their money is concerned at least.

If they get debt written off I can then see the Greek public deciding that they don't need to honour their personal debts in full either.

Firstly - and this is the biggest point I want to make here Hoof - you can attack me for being left wing. You can attack me for being a socially liberal, PC-brigade Marxist. But don't ever, ever, put me in the same category as Milliband and Balls again. They are almost as far gone from my political ideology as you are Hoof, and I hold them in total contempt.

Anyhow. On your first point, I'm going to have to tell you some facts, and I know you won't like them, but you have to deal with them because they're true. The Olympics cost Greece 9 billion euros. Their rail project cost around 1.5 billion, but let's be generous and factor in maintenance and ticket receipt losses, and say it's cost them about 5 billion. That still accounts for about 4% of Greek debt, which has nearly doubled as a percentage of GDP since 2007. It would be better to look at the excessive military spending Greece took part in before 2007 for an example of public debt accumulation, but most of that came from a corrupted government, and pressure from European nations like Germany and the UK who forced Greece in to buying frivolous submarines, arms etc.

After the financial crash, European banks lent Greece money so its own banks could continue to operate, but with very high interest rates. To repay these loans, Greece borrowed short term loans from the Troika, and saw one of the biggest economic depressions ever experienced by a developed nation with massive cuts to pensions, public infrastructure, as well as record high unemployment levels. Thus, while of course public overspending played a role in Greek debt, for you to focus on that instead of, say, the monetary union, or the debt pressure placed on the banks, or the bankers themselves, is not only to miss the elephant in the room, it's to be unaware of a herd of elephants in a room painted in sparkly colours farting directly in your face.

I have been to Greece, but unlike you I sadly wasn't able to gauge the productivity of the whole nation. However, an OECD report claims Greeks are some of the most hard working people in the world, working around 2000 hours a year, 700 more than the average German, and about 300 more than the average Brit. Not only does this dispell the myth that they're all lazy and feckless, it also suggests that maybe they actually earn that early retirement in many cases.

As for your last point, what exactly has that got to do with anything? Oh yeah, you're copying the tricks of the trade from your mentor Paul Dacre and his Nazi-supporting rag, going for tenuous personal slander rather than genuine intellectual debate. And you're telling me to behave.

WAGU has been bang on the money for me throughout this thread. Pretty sure he's from an economics background as well. It shows.