Money is a commodity, invented to help people by facilitating transactions. It is not wealth in itself. Wealth is natural resources, water, food, land, education, skill, spirit, ingenuity, art. In those terms, the people of Greece are no poorer than they were two years ago. Neither are the people of Spain or Ireland or the UK. And yet, we are all being put through various levels of suffering, in order for numbers (representing money which never existed) to be transferred from one column of a spreadsheet to another.

Exactly. A lawyer turned actor gets it. Maybe part of the solution is to let actors run the show at the ECB in Frankfurt instead of economists. Modern money is a digital token — a unit of account. This crisis can be resolved with the push of some buttons on a keyboard to mark up/down some numbers in an electronic balance sheet in Frankfurt. Alas instead we’ve to watch this ridiculous international circus of clowns (IMF, ECB, EU) pretending we’re still digging up our units of account from mother earth.