Desmond Lachman, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, says the job in front of Greece is too big even for restructuring to handle.
Lachman says they also need to devalue their currency to boost exports and trade competitiveness — though that would mean abandoning the euro. Such drastic action would mean huge costs, financial chaos, and political repercussions, and not just for the country that leaves.
“My view is, restructuring doesn’t get them out of the soup,” said Lachman, a former IMF official and former emerging markets strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. “When you don’t have a currency of your own, if you can’t devalue and get exports growing, what that means is, you can have many years of recessions — and not little recessions.”
Leaving would be “a nightmare,” he said, but better than losing several more years struggling unsuccessfully.