Greek Bailouts in Historical Perspective: Comparative Case Studies, 1893 and 2010

The economic and financial history of Greece offers interesting insights into the current worldwide economic crisis. In the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Greece went through a series of financial disasters due to external factors and to policies that failed to take fiscal stability into account, insofar as they relied heavily on foreign loans. These, in many cases, led to real bankruptcies. This article compares the attempted bailout by a British bank in 1893 with the salvage operation of 2010 that avoided the technical bankruptcy of Greece. Although the outcomes differed, owing to sharply different geopolitical and geo-economic contexts and to the amount of money committed to these financial operations, in both cases Greece relied on Europe to avoid impending financial disaster.