Greece's sovereign debt crisis and a depression-scale contraction

Greece's crisis, as Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras described it in a 2025 retrospective lecture, began as a fiscal crisis in 2009-2010 before cascading into a current account crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, and finally a banking crisis, as government bond losses, deposit flight, and a surge of non-performing loans fed back on each other. Three successive bailout programmes, financed jointly by the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF between 2010 and 2015 and by European mechanisms alone in a third programme through 2018, kept the state solvent but required a scale of fiscal adjustment that, combined with the 2012 private-sector debt restructuring, drove real GDP down by roughly a quarter cumulatively between 2009 and 2015. Unemployment rose from under 10% in 2009 to a peak above 27% in 2013, with youth unemployment above 60%, a contraction in output and living standards that Stournaras and other observers have since compared directly to the United States' experience in the Great Depression of the 1930s, in both depth and duration. Stournaras's own account credits the country's eventual stabilization to debt relief measures and the completion of the third programme in August 2018 as the point from which sustained, if modest, growth finally resumed.