Alex Massie Alex Massie

Michael Lewis Goes to Greece

During the election campaign, Labour MPs and their supporters were most put out, offended even, by the suggestion that the rotten state of Britain’s public finances placed us next to Greece in the basket-case category. And to be fair, these Labour MPs had a point: the structural deficit is serious but Britain, whatever its faults, isn’t run like Greece. Which is just as well…

Michael Lewis has been to Greece to report on their woes for Vanity Fair. The resulting piece is just as good and entertaining as you expect:

“Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses.

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