It seems like Greece was bailed out a few years ago, doesn’t it? I have a vague memory of there being a crisis in Greece that was going to ripple out to collapse the world economy or something… oh yeah, it did happen. And Greece was bailed out. So why are we talking about the same thing again? Because Greece completely wasted their bailout.

The problem therefore is not so much that Greece is incapable of reform or does not know what needs doing, but that it has wasted five years of the bailout without making serious attempts to fix the structural problems that beset the economy – and in many cases it is actually going backwards.

If it had started five years ago, it might have been seeing the results by now as countries like Ireland and Spain have done, but one of the reasons that the Greek bailout has reached another crisis point is that it has hardly started.

It is not the kind of record that is likely to make the countries that are lending Greece all that money trust them with some more.