Mr. Colm McCarthy:

Economists tend to think about these financial crises in a forward looking way. They tend to think: "It is a flipping mess. What will we do to fix it?" We are driving an ambulance and the patient is lying on the side of the road spewing blood. The trick is to see if there is some way to fix it. One does not interrogate the patient and ask if they were driving too quickly and the like. One gets him on a stretcher and into casualty as quickly as possible. Politicians tend to play a different game. It is like 12 year old children playing football when some fellow gets a kick in the head and they say: "It was not me, ref, it was him or him". That is really what has been happening for the last six months. Various governments have unwisely got into stuff relating to what was the source of all the problems in Greece. Everybody acknowledges that Greece has had poor macroeconomic management for 30 years or longer, since the 1970s, and everybody acknowledges that the Greeks did not come up with a terrific medium-term plan and so forth.