Meltdown Of The Eurozone

When the bubble burst in 2008, I was bullish on the Euro. I believed that the agreements that created it were strong and would prevent unlimited money printing by the ECB to bail out member countries.
Instead, so I thought, member countries would be forced to display fiscal sanity or face bankruptcy.
Of course, I was wrong. With politicians, you can make as many agreements as you like and can always bet that they will be broken.
Greece had a small problem in 2009: The government had cooked the books. Well, of course, all governments do that, but Greece really didn't even have an idea how much they owed. Turns out, they owed much more than they can hope to repay.
In our normal world, if a company finds itself in such a situation, the prosecuting attorney would examine what happened, identify and bring to court those responsible. In normal world, this would likely produce quite a long list of perpetrators and many people would be incarcerated and obligated to pay restitution. The company itself likely would end up in bankruptcy and creditors get a fraction of what they're owed.

What happened instead:
Leaders of the other Eurozone countries decided that bankruptcy of Greece would be unacceptable. Debt at that time stood at about $350 billion. Those same leaders decided instead to give Greece more money and "bail it out".
Now, tow years later, Greece owes about $430 billion, the Greek economy has cratered, private creditors have agreed to forgive 50% of what they're owed ("voluntarily" - another little joke in this story !) and Greece is still worse off that they have ever been.

What was a minor problem, distraction, has turned into unmitigated disaster.
Greece, of course, is not the only country with problems, but the pattern in which manageable problems are turned into armageddon, looks like this:
1. There's a problem
2. It is ignored
3. It is not corrected, but amplified (Too much debt ? Add more - Too fast ? Go faster - Slobbering drunk ? - you get the picture !)
4. Friends come in to bail out
5. Since the problem has never been addressed, and the friends themselves are not in their best shape, it now also gets those friends in trouble

End result: Everyone involved ends up bankrupt.