Douglas Carswell

Grexit? The two facts that tell us all we need to know

Since 2007, general government debt in Greece has risen by 30 percent. Over the same period of time, the size of the Greek economy has declined by 25 percent.

Forget all the blah blah from the expert pundits. Ignore all the shenanigans about what one politician said to another. Those two bald facts are all you need to know.

Greek debt has increased with every bailout (a bailout does, after all, mean assuming more debt), and the ability of Greece to pay it back has diminished.

At the very outset of the crisis, some of us said that the least worst option would be for Greece to do the three Ds; Default, then Decouple from the Euro and then Devalue. If that had happened five years ago, Greece today would no doubt be well on the road to recovery, with a competitive currency and with all that malinvestment out of the system. 

Instead our government, along with the rest of them, went ahead with a rescue plan that was specifically designed to save banks from their own exposure to Greek debt - but not actually rescue Greece from any debt.

Thanks to this disastrous approach, five years on, Greece has acquired five more year's worth of debts, making the inevitable crunch when it comes all the more painful.

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