Greece frightening

The devil is always in the detail.

Last week’s frantic negotiations to save Greece from defaulting on its loans, and in the process trigger a wider eurozone crisis, had their roots in the fact that in order to allow the country to adopt the euro, there was some serious cooking of the books. As Stewart Cowley, Old Mutual Asset Managers’ head of fixed income, points out: “Greece has run a budget deficit in double digits for years; the smoke and mirrors that got them into the European Monetary Union was precisely that – an illusion.” But in the end, the real and less palatable underlying data has bubbled to the surface. T...