@LucreLout
Even default doesn't work.
As you correctly noted, someone still has to pay the bill. At the moment, the guys who made the loans can't afford to pay the bill either. So they default. Since there are more of them then there are Greeks, it becomes an even bigger problem. That's essentially how we got into our current mess. Someone defaulted on a payment. The Germans quite properly demanded payment. It turned out they couldn't be paid, and the "security" that was nominally backing it didn't actually back it. Subsequently Lehman were put in the rack. Them being in the rack resulted in other businesses having problems. And with the line to the rack growing, somebody hit pause before the whole thing collapsed. But it still partially collapsed, and even though were no longer collapsing, we haven't really regained what was lost in the collapse.
Now here's the big catch with Greece: Lehman was small potatoes compared to them.
Nobody knows how to unwind this tiger. So people either pretend we aren't riding a wild tiger, or that they really do know how to unwind it, if only they could get to the key.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
