Everyone is pretending the debt is still sustainable, and it gives them an opportunity to us it as a mechanism, as a leverage in order to impose and continue with austerity. But it would be hard to find anyone who seriously looks at Greece and the data, who can claim this debt of 180% of GDP is sustainable. In 2010 it was 120% and that generated the whole mechanism. It is close to insane to argue that at 180% it becomes sustainable.

Writer Pavlos Roufos reviews eight years of managed disaster for Greece under Europe's austerity regime - from the roots of the crisis in both internal politics and international finance, to the perverse structure of EU-imposed austerity that plunged the country deeper in debt and slashed public services and welfare in service of an impossible outcome.

Pavlos is author of the book A Happy Future is a Thing of the Past: The Greek Crisis and Other Disasters from Reaktion Books [UK] / University of Chicago Press [US]