Professor Philip Lane:

There are different ways of phrasing it. They were in the same ballpark as those of the IMF, which included a big risk premium - or not so much a risk premium as a penalty clause, under which, in order to make sure countries do not look for bailouts until they really have to, the financing has to be at a penal rate. That is a long-standing tradition. But what that did not allow for was that we were in it together. If we are all in the common euro area, that is not the right analogy. The IMF analogy of a global membership helping an individual member country did not suit Europe, and eventually it moved to say it would essentially be at the cost of firms, more or less.