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Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis
In this real-life political thriller, former Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou tells the inside story of the six years during which the Greek drama changed Europe and riveted the world. It is the story of a country forced by past mistakes into unprecedented actions with enormously painful consequences. A story about the people who shaped events by trying to respond to rapidly evolving circumstances often beyond their control. About decisions – good and bad, right and wrong – taken in official and behind-the-scenes gatherings in Brussels, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, London, New York, Washington and Athens; in Luxembourg châteaux courtyards, Davos kitchens and Bilderberg gatherings; in elegant offices and dreary basement meetings rooms.
This is the breath-taking story of an incredible period, told for the first time not by an outside observer, but by one of its protagonists.
The author
George Papaconstantinou was born in Athens in 1961, and studied economics in the UK and the US, obtaining a Ph.D from the London School of Economics. After working for 10 years at the OECD in Paris, he returned to Greece to serve in a policy advisory capacity for the Greek government. In 2007, he was elected to the Greek Parliament, and in 2009 to the European Parliament. In October 2009 he was appointed Finance Minister in the newly formed government of George Papandreou. From that position he played a key role in the Greek crisis, negotiating the first bailout with Greece’s European partners and the IMF.
This is the breath-taking story of an incredible period, told for the first time not by an outside observer, but by one of its protagonists.
The author
George Papaconstantinou was born in Athens in 1961, and studied economics in the UK and the US, obtaining a Ph.D from the London School of Economics. After working for 10 years at the OECD in Paris, he returned to Greece to serve in a policy advisory capacity for the Greek government. In 2007, he was elected to the Greek Parliament, and in 2009 to the European Parliament. In October 2009 he was appointed Finance Minister in the newly formed government of George Papandreou. From that position he played a key role in the Greek crisis, negotiating the first bailout with Greece’s European partners and the IMF.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 11, 2016
For once, I’m a rather good guy to write the introduction to a book.
My political connections have always been with the nemesis of the Socialists, the New Democracy party. Five and a half years before the author accepted the poisoned chalice that is the Greek Finance Ministry, I had found myself in a similar position: Entirely through political connection, I was offered to run the debt office.
It was a summary process. The final decision maker was the chief of staff of the Finance Ministry, a man generally acknowledged to be honest and hard-working and whom my father (a keen follower of late-night political debate on TV) thought highly of. By the time him and I were talking turkey, it was the position of deputy we were discussing, but the process was the same. His name was George.
I visited him at his modest office and in no time I was perusing the file of the infamous Goldman swap. “Nice little gift from the previous government,” George said. “First payment not due till after we took over.” And then the bombshell: “I’m letting them stew on it. I’m in arrears! What are you going to do with this?” “Nothing,” I suggested. “This is so enormous, they can’t exactly tell anyone we’re quietly defaulting, it would be material. Let them come to you with a suggestion.” Other than remind me it was pari passu, he did not give me any indication of what he thought of my answer, but the conversation moved on.
Eventually I asked the question: “My real job. What is it? Is it to minimize the NPV of our national debt?”
George’s jaw dropped. Clearly, for all the 16 years I’d spent in Greece, I must have been some type of ingenu foreigner. To make sure we’re on the same page, to set me straight, to adjust the wavelength, the man switched to English, better to get his message across to the not-really-Greek idiot he had in front of him: “your job is to minimize the cost of debt service over the next four years.”
Now, this was (and remains) a good guy. There have always been bad people in Greek politics. People who do it strictly for self-enrichment. Nay, people who will do anything to get the job so they can steal from the public purse. George was not one of those people. He was as good a guy as you can possibly be and survive in Greek politics; this I knew. But my job under him would be to freeze the ball.
Clearly, then, I was staying put in London.
The author of the book, another George, inherited what my George (and his many predecessors) begat. This is the book of his travails.
I read this in Greek, thinking I’d be reading the original, but the original is the English version. The translation into Greek is rather gauche. Funnily enough, that was the norm in Greek politics during the reign of the third generation of the Papandreou clan, with English expressions often transliterated into stilted neologisms. In that respect, the book captures the zeitgeist very well.
It is a remarkable book both for what it has to say and for what it leaves unsaid.
The story of a new government inheriting in the middle of the worldwide crisis a 15.4% budget deficit (that had weeks before been expected to barely surpass 6.5%) is told well. You really feel the shock. If it’s the evolution of the numbers you want to follow, or the series of relentless negotiations with my country’s European partners, look no further. This will be the definitive account. The buck genuinely stops with George Papaconstantinou.
You also get to find out a lot about the attitudes of people like Trichet, Strauss-Kahn, Merkel, Sarkozy, Schaeuble, Lagarde, Barroso and how their personalities shaped the European response to the crisis. The politics of all the emergency weekend meetings, the walk down the quay in Deauville, the emergency measures and half-measures, it really is all there. You could have skipped five years of reading the FT and this book will make up for it. It is a tremendous companion book for Martin Sandbu’s book about the EU, for example.
Also, George Papaconstantinou truly comes across as modest, honest, well-meaning, moderate and suicidally selfless.
On the other hand, if it’s Greece you want to find out about, look elsewhere. This is a book about a European process. In the eyes of the public, the author was (and probably remains) the personification of the sundry memoranda that were foisted upon the country by self-serving debt collectors. His angle, of course, is that he fought like a lion. You can read the book and make up your mind.
What you will learn nothing about (zilch, zero, nada) is Greece.
Simple stuff that should be here simply isn’t. What does the private sector contribute to Greek GDP? What’s the breakdown between tourism, shipping, manufacturing, agriculture, services, importers, retail etc? Which forms of tax bring in what? Corporate tax, employment tax, VAT, income tax, property tax, stamp duty, customs? Where does it go? What goes to defense, what goes to education, what goes to healthcare, what goes to transportation, what goes to services, what goes to pensions, what goes to the other multiple entitlements? What remittances arrive from all Greeks abroad? How has all this changed in the past decade?
What parts of the economy have been growing? What’s been shrinking? What’s the best use of the marginal dollar? Which sector exports the most? To where? What’s it exporting to Europe? What sector can best be re-oriented? Who will find it easiest to move abroad if he has to contribute more tax than before? Who’s stuck? How much energy do we use? How much of it do we import?
Supposing we were to move to our own currency, what is our self-sufficiency in food, energy and medicine for which foreigners will refuse to be paid in our own scrip?
Supposing we were pardoned all our debt (or, more likely, supposing we stopped servicing our debt) what working capital would the economy need to survive a lockout from the world’s financial markets?
I would have hoped that in a 400 page opus I’d see, dunno, five pages on the above. There isn’t five sentences, really. You get some crumbs about the re-orientation of tourism and maybe a couple stats about the total tax burden. And a few throwaway words about oil imports from Iran. E basta.
The question you have to ask, then, is “was this guy really the finance minister?” Did he have the authority and power to bring about the necessary changes? Was he in a position to effect a transformation? It does not take an insider to conclude that no, he was an honest broker and not much else. And I guess he had the keys to the safe, or else he would not have been the bete noir of his party’s old guard that totally went way out its way to throw him under the bus.
So, from my angle at least, the finance minister flunks economics.
On the other hand he gets an “A” when it comes to incisive political commentary. Three issues stand out:
1. He correctly identifies Samaras as the most sinister and most tragic character in this play. The leader of the opposition fought a totally irresponsible rearguard action against the Troika’s program from 2010 to 2012, not only (i) sabotaging the country’s credibility in front of our European lenders, not only (ii) dictating domestically the anti-reform tone that still reigns supreme, but also (iii) paving the way for Tsipras to turn that exact strategy against him two short years later. It is a tale of hubris and nemesis straight out of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides.
2. He unmasks the sundry do-gooders who flocked from across the world to “defend” Greece, the Stiglitzes and the Krugmans, as well as the more nebulously-referred-to British media (Martin Wolf is a friend, you see), for what they really are: doctrinaires who were happy to fight their proxy war against “austerity” on the Greek battlefield. Who cares if their doctrine is in principle the right doctrine? In practice, they egged us on to enter a fight against our European paymasters that, politically, Germany’s Schaeuble could only be seen to win. So he did. And we lost. Our natural allies (Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy) cheered for the other side, besides, precisely because they had adopted the orthodoxy.
3. He spends the minimum number of words on Varoufakis (precisely because that’s what would displease Varoufakis the most, one presumes) but enough to parry the most pertinent accusation: the man is all about vanity.
The author also comes out of this as a tragic figure: he does not have the full picture of how to turn things around, but he knows we’ve done wrong. He can point to a million ways we got on the wrong path and he recounts with massive pride a series of changes he effected on institutions that will hopefully help Greece in twenty years’ time: He made the statistical office independent. He finally got around to getting a headcount for the number of people the Greek state employed (900,000, unbelievably), an exercise that had never been attempted before. He attempted to create a… land registry (yes, we don’t have one). And so on. Sweden-on-the-Aegean, here we come.
Thing is, when the patient is admitted to the hospital with lung cancer, first you get out the tumor. Then you have the conversation with him about smoking. And the timing is rather wrong to bring up smoking with his family. They need to know about the operation.
So I’m extremely annoyed with the author, because not once in this book does he turn his guns to those within his party that refused to consider the scalpel. Tell us about Katseli, dude. Talk to us about Ragoussis. The people who were happy to see you carry the can for the memoranda, but would not allow you to truly make the necessary changes. The people who chose their political careers over the country’s interests and eventually lost both. What’s stopping you, George? If you can see it in Samaras, if you could see it in our current president, you could sure see it in pretty much all of Pasok.
So the man is dead-honest about everything he discusses, but is rather disingenuous through omission: Greece is a failed state because both the socialists of Pasok and the “liberals” of New Democracy made the conscious decision to avoid firing public employees, avoid confronting the labor unions (e.g. those of the power company and the train company) and decided to balance out the numbers by putting most of the load on the hitherto semi-healthy private sector, the Atlas of the Greek economy.
When, under the weight of the “brave” measures that brought down the deficit from 15.4% to 4.5%, the private side of the economy literally vanished, there was nobody left to pay for the unreconstructed public sector. The blood-out-of-stone math whereby to employ somebody privately I must pay for two public employees to scratch themselves all day morphed into “no more blood left in the stone” and that’s what our political leadership, has wrought: an economy where EU-subsidised pensions are the main driver for consumption.
There cannot possibly be a 400 page account of the past Greek history that does not expose this basic truth. Not one you’d want to take seriously.
I hate to say it, because I grew to really appreciate the author as I was reading his book, but “Game Over” is a missed opportunity. On the other hand, if you care about Greece you can’t not read it.
My political connections have always been with the nemesis of the Socialists, the New Democracy party. Five and a half years before the author accepted the poisoned chalice that is the Greek Finance Ministry, I had found myself in a similar position: Entirely through political connection, I was offered to run the debt office.
It was a summary process. The final decision maker was the chief of staff of the Finance Ministry, a man generally acknowledged to be honest and hard-working and whom my father (a keen follower of late-night political debate on TV) thought highly of. By the time him and I were talking turkey, it was the position of deputy we were discussing, but the process was the same. His name was George.
I visited him at his modest office and in no time I was perusing the file of the infamous Goldman swap. “Nice little gift from the previous government,” George said. “First payment not due till after we took over.” And then the bombshell: “I’m letting them stew on it. I’m in arrears! What are you going to do with this?” “Nothing,” I suggested. “This is so enormous, they can’t exactly tell anyone we’re quietly defaulting, it would be material. Let them come to you with a suggestion.” Other than remind me it was pari passu, he did not give me any indication of what he thought of my answer, but the conversation moved on.
Eventually I asked the question: “My real job. What is it? Is it to minimize the NPV of our national debt?”
George’s jaw dropped. Clearly, for all the 16 years I’d spent in Greece, I must have been some type of ingenu foreigner. To make sure we’re on the same page, to set me straight, to adjust the wavelength, the man switched to English, better to get his message across to the not-really-Greek idiot he had in front of him: “your job is to minimize the cost of debt service over the next four years.”
Now, this was (and remains) a good guy. There have always been bad people in Greek politics. People who do it strictly for self-enrichment. Nay, people who will do anything to get the job so they can steal from the public purse. George was not one of those people. He was as good a guy as you can possibly be and survive in Greek politics; this I knew. But my job under him would be to freeze the ball.
Clearly, then, I was staying put in London.
The author of the book, another George, inherited what my George (and his many predecessors) begat. This is the book of his travails.
I read this in Greek, thinking I’d be reading the original, but the original is the English version. The translation into Greek is rather gauche. Funnily enough, that was the norm in Greek politics during the reign of the third generation of the Papandreou clan, with English expressions often transliterated into stilted neologisms. In that respect, the book captures the zeitgeist very well.
It is a remarkable book both for what it has to say and for what it leaves unsaid.
The story of a new government inheriting in the middle of the worldwide crisis a 15.4% budget deficit (that had weeks before been expected to barely surpass 6.5%) is told well. You really feel the shock. If it’s the evolution of the numbers you want to follow, or the series of relentless negotiations with my country’s European partners, look no further. This will be the definitive account. The buck genuinely stops with George Papaconstantinou.
You also get to find out a lot about the attitudes of people like Trichet, Strauss-Kahn, Merkel, Sarkozy, Schaeuble, Lagarde, Barroso and how their personalities shaped the European response to the crisis. The politics of all the emergency weekend meetings, the walk down the quay in Deauville, the emergency measures and half-measures, it really is all there. You could have skipped five years of reading the FT and this book will make up for it. It is a tremendous companion book for Martin Sandbu’s book about the EU, for example.
Also, George Papaconstantinou truly comes across as modest, honest, well-meaning, moderate and suicidally selfless.
On the other hand, if it’s Greece you want to find out about, look elsewhere. This is a book about a European process. In the eyes of the public, the author was (and probably remains) the personification of the sundry memoranda that were foisted upon the country by self-serving debt collectors. His angle, of course, is that he fought like a lion. You can read the book and make up your mind.
What you will learn nothing about (zilch, zero, nada) is Greece.
Simple stuff that should be here simply isn’t. What does the private sector contribute to Greek GDP? What’s the breakdown between tourism, shipping, manufacturing, agriculture, services, importers, retail etc? Which forms of tax bring in what? Corporate tax, employment tax, VAT, income tax, property tax, stamp duty, customs? Where does it go? What goes to defense, what goes to education, what goes to healthcare, what goes to transportation, what goes to services, what goes to pensions, what goes to the other multiple entitlements? What remittances arrive from all Greeks abroad? How has all this changed in the past decade?
What parts of the economy have been growing? What’s been shrinking? What’s the best use of the marginal dollar? Which sector exports the most? To where? What’s it exporting to Europe? What sector can best be re-oriented? Who will find it easiest to move abroad if he has to contribute more tax than before? Who’s stuck? How much energy do we use? How much of it do we import?
Supposing we were to move to our own currency, what is our self-sufficiency in food, energy and medicine for which foreigners will refuse to be paid in our own scrip?
Supposing we were pardoned all our debt (or, more likely, supposing we stopped servicing our debt) what working capital would the economy need to survive a lockout from the world’s financial markets?
I would have hoped that in a 400 page opus I’d see, dunno, five pages on the above. There isn’t five sentences, really. You get some crumbs about the re-orientation of tourism and maybe a couple stats about the total tax burden. And a few throwaway words about oil imports from Iran. E basta.
The question you have to ask, then, is “was this guy really the finance minister?” Did he have the authority and power to bring about the necessary changes? Was he in a position to effect a transformation? It does not take an insider to conclude that no, he was an honest broker and not much else. And I guess he had the keys to the safe, or else he would not have been the bete noir of his party’s old guard that totally went way out its way to throw him under the bus.
So, from my angle at least, the finance minister flunks economics.
On the other hand he gets an “A” when it comes to incisive political commentary. Three issues stand out:
1. He correctly identifies Samaras as the most sinister and most tragic character in this play. The leader of the opposition fought a totally irresponsible rearguard action against the Troika’s program from 2010 to 2012, not only (i) sabotaging the country’s credibility in front of our European lenders, not only (ii) dictating domestically the anti-reform tone that still reigns supreme, but also (iii) paving the way for Tsipras to turn that exact strategy against him two short years later. It is a tale of hubris and nemesis straight out of Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides.
2. He unmasks the sundry do-gooders who flocked from across the world to “defend” Greece, the Stiglitzes and the Krugmans, as well as the more nebulously-referred-to British media (Martin Wolf is a friend, you see), for what they really are: doctrinaires who were happy to fight their proxy war against “austerity” on the Greek battlefield. Who cares if their doctrine is in principle the right doctrine? In practice, they egged us on to enter a fight against our European paymasters that, politically, Germany’s Schaeuble could only be seen to win. So he did. And we lost. Our natural allies (Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy) cheered for the other side, besides, precisely because they had adopted the orthodoxy.
3. He spends the minimum number of words on Varoufakis (precisely because that’s what would displease Varoufakis the most, one presumes) but enough to parry the most pertinent accusation: the man is all about vanity.
The author also comes out of this as a tragic figure: he does not have the full picture of how to turn things around, but he knows we’ve done wrong. He can point to a million ways we got on the wrong path and he recounts with massive pride a series of changes he effected on institutions that will hopefully help Greece in twenty years’ time: He made the statistical office independent. He finally got around to getting a headcount for the number of people the Greek state employed (900,000, unbelievably), an exercise that had never been attempted before. He attempted to create a… land registry (yes, we don’t have one). And so on. Sweden-on-the-Aegean, here we come.
Thing is, when the patient is admitted to the hospital with lung cancer, first you get out the tumor. Then you have the conversation with him about smoking. And the timing is rather wrong to bring up smoking with his family. They need to know about the operation.
So I’m extremely annoyed with the author, because not once in this book does he turn his guns to those within his party that refused to consider the scalpel. Tell us about Katseli, dude. Talk to us about Ragoussis. The people who were happy to see you carry the can for the memoranda, but would not allow you to truly make the necessary changes. The people who chose their political careers over the country’s interests and eventually lost both. What’s stopping you, George? If you can see it in Samaras, if you could see it in our current president, you could sure see it in pretty much all of Pasok.
So the man is dead-honest about everything he discusses, but is rather disingenuous through omission: Greece is a failed state because both the socialists of Pasok and the “liberals” of New Democracy made the conscious decision to avoid firing public employees, avoid confronting the labor unions (e.g. those of the power company and the train company) and decided to balance out the numbers by putting most of the load on the hitherto semi-healthy private sector, the Atlas of the Greek economy.
When, under the weight of the “brave” measures that brought down the deficit from 15.4% to 4.5%, the private side of the economy literally vanished, there was nobody left to pay for the unreconstructed public sector. The blood-out-of-stone math whereby to employ somebody privately I must pay for two public employees to scratch themselves all day morphed into “no more blood left in the stone” and that’s what our political leadership, has wrought: an economy where EU-subsidised pensions are the main driver for consumption.
There cannot possibly be a 400 page account of the past Greek history that does not expose this basic truth. Not one you’d want to take seriously.
I hate to say it, because I grew to really appreciate the author as I was reading his book, but “Game Over” is a missed opportunity. On the other hand, if you care about Greece you can’t not read it.
September 29, 2018
Excellent insight with first hand information
Mr. Papaconstantinou is a fantastic story teller. He took what should be a very dull set of facts and made it fun to read. I feel much more informed on the subject and went looking for more books to read by Mr. Papaconstantinou. Unfortunately I was unable to find any more on kindle. I hope there will be more to come on other aspects of Greek politics.
Mr. Papaconstantinou is a fantastic story teller. He took what should be a very dull set of facts and made it fun to read. I feel much more informed on the subject and went looking for more books to read by Mr. Papaconstantinou. Unfortunately I was unable to find any more on kindle. I hope there will be more to come on other aspects of Greek politics.
August 30, 2018
Excellent cooking tips, changed the way I thought about making briam.
May 23, 2017
A fascinating memoir from the second in command at the beginning of the recent greek tragedy. A must read if you want insight on how Greece is in it's current broken state.
December 11, 2016
Very good retelling of the Greek financial crisis by an insider. No new revelations, still an amazing series of events.
September 21, 2018
A fascinating and disturbing personal story with many insights into the Greek crisis. Flowing narrative and a very enjoyable writing style. Couldn’t help but feel the strong similarity of this book with my own Diary of the Euro Crisis in Cyprus. Papaconstantinou was handed over a nuclear bomb and he had to do his best to diffuse it to protect his country. The least one would expect in those circumstances is to be harassed and scapegoated by ones fellow countrymen. The sense of injustice is overwhelming but doesn’t take away from the suspense.
November 16, 2024
Learnt a lot about the workings of the troika, and how difficult it was to meet ever changing goal posts. However it was overly stylistic in places, and read like a bitter memoir. A lot of name dropping and self aggrandizing makes me question how impartial / unbiased the account it.
August 18, 2016
One of the main actors of the ongoing political and financial crisis in Greece offers his side of the story (and a rare insight) in a convincing page turner which offers some answers and provokes more questions that other actors should answer. Occasional funny instances include author's reactions in first visit to White House and other events where the former finance minister feels like a true outsider.
June 29, 2016
Informative and easy to read
A memoir by the Greek finance minister at the start of the 2009 euro crisis. Best summary of the various bailouts of Greece up to the present that I have read.
A memoir by the Greek finance minister at the start of the 2009 euro crisis. Best summary of the various bailouts of Greece up to the present that I have read.
October 5, 2017
Very informative book. Highly recommend it. I was sceptical when the description said a political thriller but found myself totally drawn. Spent a lot of time on google as I carried on reading to fully understand the book and the situation at the time. An important book of our time.
August 13, 2016
The "inside story" part of the narrative was pretty thin.
Read
October 2, 2017Detailed account of the Greek crisis from eyes of a minister
The book gives a detailed account of the Greek Debt crisis from 2009 to 2015/16. Given the author of the book ceased to be a minister in 2012, rest of the details are more from newspaper and what has appeared in the print media.
After 50% point, I felt as if reading news reports summarized by the author. The book doesn't go much in depth on why the crisis started but spends a lot g time on how it was handled. So if you are looking for the handling part, this book can give some insights but not otherwise.
The book gives a detailed account of the Greek Debt crisis from 2009 to 2015/16. Given the author of the book ceased to be a minister in 2012, rest of the details are more from newspaper and what has appeared in the print media.
After 50% point, I felt as if reading news reports summarized by the author. The book doesn't go much in depth on why the crisis started but spends a lot g time on how it was handled. So if you are looking for the handling part, this book can give some insights but not otherwise.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews