"Greek families and businesses are experiencing a difficult period. Regardless of the biggest financial consolidation ever undertaken in Europe, the debt of Greece will continue to grow. It will exceed 150 percent of GDP before starting to decrease. There are no magic solutions to the problems of Greece", concluded the Minister. He also focused on the pension reform and on the liberalization of the labor market which he characterized as revolutionary. "It is not a socialist act to let the country go bankrupt. It is a socialist act to reform it in the name of the interests of ordinary people", said George Papaconstantinou apparently in a response to the criticism of his party members that he is not following left-wing policies.
     The most synthetic picture of the reasons for the financial crisis gave the Executive Director of Eurobank EFG Nikos Nanopoulos who spoke about the international imbalance of the economy, opaque financial instruments, lack of supervision and regulation, bonuses and a disturbed relation of the financial system with the real economy. He described the current economic crisis as the most severe in the postwar history of Europe. "The worse things are going, the more stringent supervision is exercised. The better the situation develops, the weaker its supervision. This was the philosophy so far and it must change", said the banker and declared to be in favor of a more ambitious supervisory framework in the European Union, covering all SIFIs (Systematically Important Financial Institutions), and not just the banks.
    Of course, Nikos Nanopoulos is the Vice president of the Association of Greek bankers and he analyzes the problems from their perspective. He opposed the excessively high criteria for the capitalization of banks, because large capitalization leads to a higher cost of money and reduces the demand for loans, which in turn destabilizes the financial system. "Bigger capitalization wouldn’t have saved Lehman Brothers", said the Executive Director of Eurobank EFG. He also has no reason to be pleased with the credit rating agencies, because once they lower the credit rating of Greece, the ratings of Greek banks follow. "The philosophy of the credit rating agencies is based on the CDS spreads - if they grow, the credit rating decreases. Why, then, do we need the agencies? We can directly follow the CDS-s", said Nikos Nanopoulos.
    He explained that the Greek banks are very simple entities compared to the major global investment banks. They follow a conservative investment policy and have contributed a lot to the development of Southeast Europe. They currently suffer from a crisis which they did not cause and there is no opening to the toxic products. He declared to be in favor of the harmonization of accounting rules, regulated by the directives Basel1 and Basel2, of the transparency of the swaps, increased attention to the maturity transformation (i.e. the practice of taking short-term loans to invest in long term projects) and an open dialogue between the banks, markets and supervisors.
    Perhaps the open dialogue between all players on the stage of the European financial markets and their supervisors is the only protection against over-regulation, over-control and over-interference. Otherwise, shortly after in Europe, just like in the novels of Ayn Rand we will begin to ask who is John Galt.