GREECE, PLAY BY PLAY
What was done, what was refused, and by whom — 2009 to 2018, read from France in 2026
What was done, what was refused, and by whom — 2009 to 2018, read from France in 2026
Every turn of the Greek crisis with its date, the people in the room, the alternative that was on the table and who killed it. The same grid is then laid over France: three prime ministers since the dissolution, two of them removed by parliament over a budget, and a 10-year spread that doubled between mid-July and 2 October 2026.
The Greek crisis was not one decision but about a hundred, and most of the important ones were refusals. Restructuring was refused in May 2010 and done in March 2012. ECB bond purchases were 'not discussed' on a Thursday and launched the following Monday. Eurobonds were refused in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and issued in 2020. An official-sector haircut was refused every year from 2012 to 2018 and never granted; the relief came as maturities instead.
This page keeps the ledger. Each entry in the timeline carries what was adopted, what was rejected and by whom. The cast shows who held which seat when, and how far each moved. The toolkit lists every instrument the ECB and the euro area have built since 2008, with its gate.
France in 2026 is not Greece in 2010 — the deficit is a third the size, the statistics are not in doubt, the current account is balanced. But the politics rhyme: no party will co-own a consolidation, a structural reform was reversed to keep a government alive, and the challenger leading every poll is being priced six months before the vote. And the instruments that ended the last crisis are either gone (SMP, PEPP reinvestment), gated behind a programme France would have to request (OMT), or gated behind criteria France does not obviously meet (TPI).
The French section uses the Eurex off-book tape for sub-second OAT, Bund and BTP yields and the futures basis since mid-July. Debt cost takes the State's bonds line by line and prices what each year's refinancing adds to the interest bill; Backstops sets out who could buy French debt, on what trigger, for what fiscal effort, and how the sums compare with what the troika and the ECB actually deployed. Parallels sets the two cases side by side. Everything plotted can be taken away: each figure has PNG, SVG, CSV, copy-image and copy-data buttons, and exports on a light ground.
Ten-year yields with every dated event marked. Pick a phase to zoom both the chart and the list; click an event to pin it on the chart. Yields are monthly averages — the only definition public for all countries — so intraday peaks were higher.
Spreads show contagion; deposits and TARGET balances show the run behind them. Contagion was total in 2011 and absent in 2015 — the difference between a Greece that could not be allowed to fail and one that could be told to choose.
Who held which seat, October 2009 to August 2018. Greece changed finance minister nine times; Germany once. Hover a bar for dates. Vertical lines: first programme, PSI, 'whatever it takes', third programme, exit.
Where each principal started, where they ended, and the decisions in between.
Elections and changes of government in the euro area shaped by the crisis. ● the incumbent lost office.
The same events, read for the road not taken. A proposal appears here if someone with a veto said no. Several came back: the right-hand column says what happened next.
Every instrument built to protect monetary transmission or to finance a member state, with the condition that opens it and what it would mean for France today. Verdicts are this site's reading, not an official view.
The same ledger for France from the dissolution of June 2024, then the tape. Daily spreads to mid-June 2026 are TEC10 less the Bundesbank 10-year par yield. From 16 July 2026 they are futures-implied from Eurex EFP prints — a different measure, cheapest-to-deliver to cheapest-to-deliver, plotted as a separate series.
The State's negotiable debt, bond by bond, from the Agence France Trésor bulletin, refinanced at the yields on the Eurex tape. Each line pays its coupon until it matures and is then replaced at today's issuance yield; the deficit is borrowed at the same yield. It is arithmetic on a published schedule, not a forecast: move the sliders to change the assumptions.
Five rungs, from what already exists to what was built for much smaller countries. For each: what triggers it, what France would have to do, how large it can be, and what the same step did to spreads when it was last tried. The higher the rung, the more it buys and the more it asks.
Spreads are ten-year yields over Germany, monthly averages (ECB), in the month before the decision and a few months after. A monthly average flattens the day of the announcement; the working papers cited measure that.
Where the comparison holds and where it breaks. France's problem is political capacity, not solvency arithmetic; Greece's was both.
econdata from the ECB Data Portal, Eurostat and DBnomics; the Eurex tape comes from the eurex-offbook archive. The event ledger is hand-written and cites, per entry, ECB press releases, Eurogroup and Euro Summit statements, court press releases and the ESM's programme pages where one exists, Wikipedia chronologies and Reuters wire copy otherwise. Election results, programme votes, the restructuring figures and the summit texts were read back against those documents; the ledger as a whole has been spot-checked, not audited line by line. Stances attributed to people are summaries, not quotations, unless in quotation marks.