It’s Not About Greece Anymore

It never really was. When a European Union country is in trouble that affects all the other countries in the monetary union.

This is both good and bad. It's bad, because countries that have their book in order are hit as well, it's good because of precisely the same reason, the rest of Europe can no longer afford to close its eyes to the problems of a neighbour in trouble.

Greece is a strange mix of relatively little economic impact at first glance, but a complex mix of banking and shipping holdings that have the potential to do a lot of harm if something dramatic were to happen.

The Greeks have been in trouble for a much longer perdiod, but the current combination of issues hopefully gives them the tools to finally get rid of a political system that has been rife with corruption and that has to a large extent been at least partially guilty in creating this situation.

Something good might come out of this, if the EU manages to help stabilizing Greece and stop the slide then it will emerge far stronger than it is today. If it allows the Greek crisis to spiral out of control and spill over in to other economically weak EU member states then the consequences will be grave.

It's not a time for little bits of help and band-aids, the EU will need to make some fairly bold moves, it remains to be seen if the resolve is present to actually do that.

This is especially tricky because the mortgage crisis is making lots of people skeptical of the Euro right now, and chipping in to help Greece is not going to go down well with the majority of the European electorate in countries that can still pretend they're not affected.