The Legacy of a Fractured Eurozone: the Greek Dra(ch)ma

This paper addresses the acute Greek economic and social crisis that was inflicted on Greece since 2010 with the unleashing of the 3 consecutive bailout plans and the implementation of fierce austerity policies. We further scrutinise the composition of the soaring Greek debt and, most importantly, the unsettling utilisation of the Troika loans for the 2010-2015 period. We provide evidence that the vast bulk of the loans went overwhelmingly not to benefiting a "profligate" Greek state but to avoiding the write downs of bad loans made by reckless creditors (mainly, German and French banks) to the Greek government and private banks. We propose the temporary adoption of a parallel currency in the form of government IOUs, together with other drastic measures to reboot the ailing Greek economy inside the Eurozone.