Re Greece - one of the main things as I understand is that the French and the US flogged them 51 (?) fighter jets in the mid-2000s, which were unimaginably expensive and still haven't been cut.
But other countries took the decision to buy Greek government bonds (and so now can't let Greece default) - bad investment decisions as with the sub-prime mortgages in the States. And people aren't getting punished for that, they're bailing these bastards out and punishing ordinary people who had nothing to do with any of it through 'austerity'. If you throw money at a bad investment, you should lose that money.
I dunno, it's all such a mess:
"The neoliberal turn therefore came later in Greece than elsewhere in Europe. It was Costas Simitis, PASOK prime minister from 1996 to 2004, aided by Papademos at the central bank, who set the country on a course of sell-offs and deregulation, while also claiming to cut the deficit, lower labour costs and crush inflation, bringing the country into line with EMU convergence criteria and joining the euro in 2001. Financial deregulation had produced a frenzy of speculative activity, boosting the Athens stock market to unprecedented heights and transferring large quantities of wealth upwards to a newly financialized elite; euphoria rose higher still in the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics. In reality, as the world now knows, the deficit figures were rigged: Simitis and Papademos oversaw a fee of $300 million to Goldman Sachs to shift billions of euros of debt off the public accounts. Yet even when this was revealed by Eurostat in 2004, the ratings agencies continued to give Greek bonds a triple-A investment grade. Like Spain and Ireland, Greece was seen as a Eurozone success story, by contrast to the ‘rigidities’ of France and Germany. Its traditional sectors of shipping and banking were riding high during the globalization boom; Greek banks expanded their operations into Romania and Bulgaria. Growth rates soared, buoyed up by credit provided, not least, by French and German banks, which fuelled a lending boom to Greek consumers. The government debt, too, soared—stabilizing at around 100 per cent of GDP as of 1993—drawing on both domestic and above all foreign loans, the latter comprising two-thirds of the total. French loans funded an extraordinary arms-buying spree: in 2005–09, for example, Greece bought 25 French Mirage-2000 jets and 26 F-16 fighters from the US, purchases which accounted for 40 per cent of the country’s total imports."
