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Can someone please send this to the Greeks, Irish, Italians, Portuguese and the Spaniards:

It is a slow day in a damp little Greek village. The rain is beating down harshly, and all the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the village, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

The owner gives him some room-keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the €100 note and rushes down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of animal feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the friendly neighbourhood pub. The pub owner slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar - who, in spite of facing hard times, has always gladly offered him her ‘services’ on credit.

The hooker then rushes over to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note.

The hotel proprietor quietly replaces the €100 note back on the counter, so that the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, states that none of the rooms are satisfactory, picks up the €100 note, pockets it and leaves town.

No one has produced anything. No one has earned anything. However, the whole village is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that is how a basic financial bailout package works!

that's internal debt, not foreign debt.

what PIIGS owed are foreign debt, e.g. they owed foreign investors such as Germans, Frenches, etc, not themselves.

Is the same. German comes to Greek Village to improve the circulation. the Hotelier is the gov who runs out of cash and need to borrow.

One thing i do like to comment is the value-add within the village is little. They hardly export anything that the world needs. So anything is marked up therefore increased cost of living. Likely less than $100 returned onto the table and the churns continue less and less.

A beautiful theory that is repeatedly mentioned during the subprime crisis but based on the assumption that the people in debt do not have a tendency to save (reverse multiplier effect for debt) and that they have sufficient productivity or revenue generation ability that is equivalent to debt amount. The possibility if they have control over their currency is to inflate their debt away or debtholders would have to recognize they made an investment error and take losses on the default.