Originally posted by sasquatch672
Your country in particular very much resents having to bail out the people of the olive for their profligacy. Your country is the only of of the six remaining AAA-rated countries not facing a downgrade. Your public spending is a very healthy 50% of GDP, and you very wisely demanded collateral for your contribution to bailout funds. But that's Finland ...[text shortened]... ly healthy, and Italy and Spain, who, for different reasons, are not.
Enough of a start?
It's a start, but as we say in Dutch: you heard the bell, but you don't know where the clapper is.
First of all, the trigger of the eurozone crisis was obviously the 2008/2009 financial crash. Since investors tend to be morons, they implicitly assumed there was some kind of fiscal union in the eurozone, even though there wasn't. This means that up to 2008 or so most countries paid about the same interest rate on their bonds. After the 2008 investors partially realized how far their head was up their backside and suddenly demanded more interest, while at the same time government budgets were under pressure due to the crisis. In Ireland and Spain there was a real estate bubble. Italy was already in fiscal trouble before 2008, as was Portugal. In Greece, government officials had hidden deficits, which suddenly turned out to be much larger. Investors fled to triple-A countries, which now find themselves paying almost no interest on their bonds - Finnish, German and Dutch politicians may sound worried about Greece and the sovereign debt crisis, but in reality the cost of borrowing is going down massively for these countries. They are not worried about Greece.
Of course none of this has anything to do with the fiscal situation in the US, although perhaps the thing they have in common is that both Greece and the US refuse to sufficiently tax the population (especially the wealthy).