A lot of commentators - and, of the politicians, at least our finance minister, Mr. Schäuble - are treating the Greek national finance crisis like a sort of Titanic-after-the-iceberg. They all "know" it's sinking, but at least want to have all the deckchairs in a line, looking proper. Worse: They constantly cluck & fuss about the silly or "blind" current Greek government...

While they are apparently blind to the "elephants in the room"!

I'm an economic layman, but even I remember that off and on, major blame for Greece's badly worsened & constantly worsening state has been put on these figurative pachyderms. That is hardly mentioned now.

Let's do the quiz: Is it the politicians - Tsipras / Merkel / Juncker? Not recently. Is it the greedy Greek state officials & their pensions? No. Could it be the banks? YES!

Not solely (before, during & after 2008) but also the Greek banks*.

Before 2008 they, like many others in Europe (instrumentally e.g. Deutsche Bank, as one of the major architects of the crash & thus the crisis) played the derivative speculation game on the world's stock exchanges. Credit default swaps & suchlike.

Just after the 2008 crash, the big banks had to be rescued by their corresponding state, which put up emergency capital to prevent them from defaulting: 'After the [Lehman] collapse [..] most countries - incl. Greece - made exhaustive guarantees for their banks. In addition many countries shored up their badly shaken financial institutions with new [..] capital & provided billions [of EUR] for gigantic market reflation packages [..].'

This i.a. means that most of the emergency bale-out loans already provided by the EU did not reach the Greek populace - even those bad, bad state officials - but got sunk into the country's banks.

In the meantime, most recently just 48 hours ago, Greek banks have received additional "emergency aid" from the ECB to prevent breaks in cash flow to increasingly nervous depositors, beginning a slow but increasing bank run at time of writing. If I remember reading somewhere correctly, this alone comes to about 80 billion EUR in total since 2008. And is not reckoned into the national Greek debt, of course!

And, finally, this layman's guess how the Greek banks will do after a "Grexit": All positive EUR bank balances - like people's savings in bank accounts - will be devalued along with the soon following devaluation of the drachma, which would then replace EUR as national currency. But: Most negative bank balances - plus the mounting debts the banks owe to creditors outside of Greece - would "grow" as fast as the drachma is devalued.

Not only would Greece after a "Grexit" then have a multiplied debt toward the EU & IWF immediately after ousting the EUR. But its banks would be even more likely to default, in that event bringing even most of the daily exchange of monies within the economy to a massive standstill. (What follows after that - bartering?)

This 7-year-old crisis was and is one of bad banks! Thus it doth seem to dumb old me...

P.S.: So, are the politicians - like the Greek government of recent years, like Merkel & her diverse finance ministers - to blame at all? I quote experts: 'Above all the governments of the greater countries are co-responsible for the financial crisis. They believed economists preaching the efficiency of financial markets, & were wooed successfully by the mighty & well-endowed banking lobby. So [..] they continually deregulated financial markets and bank trading, and thus made the crisis possible [..].'