 I have some familiarity, in fact I have a good deal of familiarity with the former Greek finance minister, my friend Yanis Varoufakis, and it's largely because of that relationship, which again, four years ago, and especially over the two years before the elections when we were colleagues at the University of Texas, that I had the opportunity to witness and participate in some of the events that I want to talk about this afternoon. There was, as you may possibly recall, an original document, a proposal called the Modest Proposal, that was co-authored by Yanis Varoufakis, Stuart Holland, former Labor MP from the UK, and myself, which was reflected to a degree in the electoral program of Syriza, the coalition of the parties of the radical left in Greece in the elections last January. It called for action at the European level to stabilize the eurozone by offsetting some of the endemic imbalances, of which Heiner Flasbeck is noted, chronicler, and the financial instabilities of the system. There were four elements to that proposal. One was a proposal to institute a process of mutualization of the national debts up to the limit of the Maastricht criteria, that this is a first 60% of GDP, through the good offices of the European Central Bank. The second was to have a case-by-case resolution of failed banks by the European authority in order to break the toxic linkages between national banks and national governments, both of them ostensibly bankrupt in the Greek case. The third was an investment program working through the European Investment Bank, the European Investment Fund, in order to provide a degree of offset to the prevalent austerity period. And the fourth was a program of moves toward some common social insurance beginning with food assistance for the most vulnerable people, particularly in the periphery of the eurozone and funding that through the financial mechanism of tapping into the surpluses in the Target 2 system. That was the original modest proposal. There was simply no discussion of it during the five months of the Syriza government and never entered in any serious way into the negotiations with the European creditors. I arrived in Athens, pursuant to a summons from Yanis right after the elections, an email that said, get here as soon as you can, on the 8th of February, and a few days later I traveled with the Greek government to Brussels to begin the process of negotiations. It was clear from the start that the creditors had an agenda that had been unaltered by the Greek elections, that for them what was on the table was a compliance review of the existing program, the memorandum of understanding, and that the consequence of being found not to comply with the program of failing to get a successful review would be, first of all, no disbursement of further funds, and secondly, the grave risk of a crash of the banking system. In fact, their direct threat of a crash of the banking system was delivered to the Greek government by the chairman of the Eurogroup in the first days after the election, something similar to what I learned in the papers today happened in Ireland in 2010. So the immediate goal of the Greek government became simply to gain time to achieve an agreement on four exceptionally modest propositions. Four Greece alone, which were necessary given both the political mandate of the government, and the fact that for five years the previous program, the program had been in effect, had utterly failed to stabilize the Greek economy, let alone to instigate an economic recovery. This is a situation where in 2010 when the program was instituted, the official forecasts were for a recession that would cost about 5% of GDP and be over in a couple of years, and the actual situation was a depression that cost 25% of GDP, and which showed no signs of terminating, so you had a cumulative loss that was well over 100% of GDP, annual GDP over the five-year period, and the Greek electorate had, I think, quite reasonably concluded that a prospect for success by continuing down that path were effectively nil. So the government was asking for four things, essentially, in the renegotiation of the program. The first was a reasonable fiscal target expressed in terms of the primary surplus. The demand previously had been for 4.5%. That was obviously not going to be achieved, and there was a criterion of basic honesty, which was involved here, the Greek government being led in this case by the finance minister who was an economist with a reputation for honesty could not sign on to a set of targets which it knew it would be violating very soon. Secondly, a return to basic rights for collective bargaining, basic labor rights, at least in the line with the standards of the International Labor Organization, which had been basically abrogated in Greece by the terms of the memorandum. Thirdly, protection for the most vulnerable frail and impoverished of Greece's pensioners, many of whom were receiving around 350 Euro a month, the median pension in Greece is 150 or so, which is just barely above the poverty line. So there was a large group of people for whom the memorandum dictated additional cuts from a very low base, and the government had taken the position that it would not go along with those cuts. And fourthly, a position with respect to privatizations. It was a left-wing government, it was ostensibly opposed to privatizations as a matter of principle, but it did not take that position in government. It merely took the position that while the government could not continue to run all of the commercially realizable assets that it had, it would also be very unwise to put them all on the auction block at the same time for the very simple reason, I think, known to any economist no matter how neoclassical or dimwitted that if you put everything for sale at once you get a very low price. And the evidence on that was very clear, the privatization programs under the memorandum had yielded far below the revenue projections. So those were the four points. There was no Keynesian program, no large deficit in the projections, no jobs program, no demand for no strings attached money, there was a great deal of agreement with what the, with other provisions of the memorandum actually. There was nothing in fact noticeably left-wing about this particular government or its positions except for its name and its political background. The Greek government was prepared to sign a new agreement. It wanted merely to change the most toxic, destructive and unsuccessful features of the old one. In the background, later on, it would also have to be a discussion over restructuring of the Greek debt, but apart from principal repayments which had been cleverly scheduled to be front-loaded in the first six months of this year, the debt itself was not the most urgent question on the table. The only thing that really drew from the modest proposal that the Greek government did early on was to institute a kind of an electronic food stamp program, 200 euro a month for the most vulnerable citizens to buy food, a food cart. So that was one thing which actually part of what I had contributed to the modest proposal that did get into law, the humanitarian bill. That was done over the objections of the creditors who complained that it was a unilateral action. The government also had ideas about tax collection, about how to help people clear, particularly people who had modest arrears by instituting an installment plan, and that too was enacted over vigorous creditor objections. The result was four months of discussions which were called negotiations, but were not really negotiations. They were pseudo negotiations, if you like. During which time the creditors made no concessions to speak of, they allowed themselves to come down by one point on the target for the primary surplus from four and a half to three and a half percent, replacing an utterly unrealistic target with a also utterly unrealistic target. They destabilized the Greek banking system by a drip drop approach to the emergency liquidity assistance, which became the sole source of support for the Greek banking system once the waiver that permitted Greek banks to finance themselves at the ECB was canceled on the 4th of February. This was at a time when enter bank loans lending was withdrawn, so the Greek banking system became ever more reliant on the ELA as time went on. I think this is also an experience which was felt in Ireland some years before. They engaged, as I'm sure you're all aware, in a campaign which can only be described as a vicious campaign of leaks and of defamation aimed at, in particular at Yanis Verifakis, but at the Greek government generally, effectively ignoring very substantial proposals which have now been made public that the Greek government put on the table and allowing the press, and particularly the Anglo-Saxon press, to report that the Greeks were wasting time not making proposals and so forth. Meanwhile they drained or allowed the Greek government to drain itself of financial reserves as the government made 3.5 billion euro in payments without receiving any new funds to help finance them basically by drawing down every reserve that the state had, also university and hospital reserves. And they consorted with the opposition and prepared a replacement government, hoping that the political support for the Syriza government would collapse, which in fact it did not, somewhat to our surprise. But in any event they ran out the clock on what was the new June 30th deadline and of course the drama that came on at that point. The referendum, the referendum result on the 5th, the referendum was called on the 27th of June, referendum held on the 5th of July and then the additional escalation that followed resulting in the capitulation of the government. And the capitulation of the government was followed by its internal collapse as the left platform left. And now we are in the process of effectively not only the dissolution of the Greek political system, but to a certain degree the dissolution of the Greek state. The Slovakian vice-price minister describes it as a protectorate, but it is in fact a regime of asset liquidation and dispossession, combining the policy features of the previous regime, basically unaltered with continuous time oversight that is to say reviews every quarter of compliance and an element of, I would describe it as gratuitous collective humiliation and punishment for the impertinence of having objected to the results of the regime over the previous five years. Just incidentally as the Greek state is being expected to act as the front line in the refugee crisis as everybody knows. I should add that so far as I am aware no one anywhere in Europe in the creditor institutions or governments or at the IMF believes in the program which was signed on the 12th of July, perhaps apart from some of the representatives of the Baltic states. The Spaniards, the Portuguese and perhaps also the Irish governments had internal political motivations for the position that they took, nothing to do with the economic conditions in Greece. The European Central Bank objected to having its presence and power curtailed on the ground in Greece and was among other things very determined to assert its own authority. The European Commission, the French and the Italians tried to be helpful, they were not extremely effective, and the Germans who were the main interlocutors and on whom the Greek government reposed its hopes that they would be a political solution that could be reached at the level of Angela Merkel and the essentially senior players on the world stage decided not to play that political role but that to bring the boom down on the government of Greece. So this is a situation in which the merits of the Greek case were not seriously contested. They were simply exposited by the Greeks and ignored by their interlocutors. The question before us is what is the future of the Eurozone? And what I've described for you is a case in point about what is the Eurozone at the present time, at least so far as small countries are concerned. It is a rolling game of extended pretend, of debt colonization, of financial fear, and of liquidations. With the usual psychological results which are visible to any observer on the Greek scene at this point namely depression, suicides, homelessness, social breakdown, immigration of professional talent and of working people. The idea appears to be in some quarters that if a sufficiently strong dose of this treatment is meted out to one country that can be portrayed as obstreperous, uncooperative, unreformable, and otherwise defective, which is essentially the image being given of Greece in the larger world, then that will discourage the others. It will discourage the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Irish, perhaps the Italians, and the French from thinking about following the same path. And possibly that calculation is correct. Certainly the path that Syriza took, the government of Alexis Tsipras took, which was to engage in good faith negotiation in the context of a complete commitment to maintaining its position in the European Union and in the Eurozone, a commitment consistent with the overwhelming view of the Greek public, including two-thirds of the people who voted no in the referendum, according to opinion polls. That path for a small country has been tested, and the results are I think really distressingly clear. So it's very unlikely that if and when there is another revolt, and there surely will be another revolt at some point, it's very unlikely that this same path will be advanced as the line of political argument, political development. Instead, the next revolt will come with an overt plan B. The next revolt will come with not merely the secret plan B, which in fact I was asked to prepare and did prepare in an atmosphere of exquisite secrecy. We were quite proud of that, considering the reputation of the Greek finance ministry for talking too much, that nobody learned about it until after, until we chose to reveal it. But we did that only as a contingency plan, and that will not be the case next time. Next time it will be a point of strategy to have the plan on the table from the start, all options on the table, as the United States used to like to say in negotiations over Iran. And the trigger will be short. I don't think any government will again exhaust its reserves, as Greece did, drive its hospitals to the brink of failure, its universities to the brink of collapse, in order to demonstrate good faith to the eurozone, waiting for a demonstration of good faith in return. And the technical questions, which were quite difficult for us of how one goes about executing a plan B and how one does this without causing really great difficulties for, let's say, elderly people who rely on the ATMs to draw their pensions. These technical difficulties will have been discussed and will have been resolved, as I think they would have been resolved in Greece if we had been forced to go down this road. But they continued to be, let's say, major challenges throughout the period during which it was a live possibility. Anyway, those questions will most likely seem much more clear to the next rebels to come along and they will therefore have a roadmap, which the Greeks did not originally have. I can tell you that this discussion is going on in left circles, I think everywhere in Europe. I was just in France. I observed a live discussion along these lines. Will some thing happen soon? I don't know. It's very hard to say. But the future of the euro, I think it's far, it was not made more secure by the position that the creditors took in the Greek crisis. It was made considerably less secure. The future is certainly going to be viewed by an increasing part of the European population, not just on the right, but also on the progressive last, as nasty and brutish. Whether short or not, time will tell. But I shall just close by asserting a variant of Stein's law. Herbert Stein, who's the chief economic advisor to Richard Nixon, asserted his version of it and mine is that when something cannot continue, it will end. Thank you very much.