The sooner Greece leaves the euro, the better

Ten years ago, the Greek minister Yainnos Papantoniou came to London to give a talk at the London School of Economic on the country’s first four years as a member of the euro. A skilled, pro European technocrat, Papantoniou had, more than anyone else, steered his country through dogged German resistance into the single currency. Papantoniou boasted that a history of weak growth and chaotic government had been swept aside, and that Greece was now the equal of Germany and France. What lay ahead, he argued was ‘a new dynamic phase for the Greek economy, based on knowledge and modern structures’. A ‘bolstering of national self-confidence’ would be the natural result.

It was an articulate exposition of the view of a whole generation of Mediterranean politicians, eurocrats and bankers. The euro was in part a currency, but it was also a catalyst: a single element that would sweep away out-dated structures, and catapult them to modernisation.