No "soft" options for Greece

There are growing signs that the EU will allow Greece to undertake a “soft” debt restructuring, probably involving the voluntary exchange of debt for bonds of longer maturities. This could ease the near-term pressures on Greece, but have less damaging effects than a full-blown default. But it seems likely that the markets would view a debt rescheduling as merely a temporary sticking plaster. Like the bail-outs before it, it would do nothing to address Greece’s problems and could even worsen them if accompanied by more austerity measures which pushed the economy deeper into recession. For Greece and the euro-zone, there are no soft ways out of the crisis.