So this is the way they're going to play the Greek economic story, is it?
Expect to see a great deal more of this nonsense in the coming months. The Greek economy is recovering and so that makes all that happened worth it. It's ghastly rubbish and needs to be called out as such, repeatedly:
Yet now Tsipras is preparing to exit the bailout programmes completely, the country’s economic prospects apparently utterly transformed.
The gushing praise in the quote came from Angel Gurria, head of the OECD, last week – the leader of a pro-capitalist group, cheering the work of the leader of Greece’s radical leftists. “I would like to congratulate you, your administration and the whole of Greece for an impressive stabilisation effort and one of the most ambitious reform packages we have seen at the OECD in recent times,” said Gurria. “This is starting to bear fruit.”
Everyone knows, or at least should know, that an economy will, eventually, recover entirely on its own. Even some 30 years of Maoist Madness didn't leave China unable to grow once it ended.
Thus the arrival of growth again is not a vindication of what happened in Greece. The fact that it is only just returning is instead a condemnation of what was done to that poor benighted populace.
Given the situation at the time Greece could do one of two things. It could leave the euro and thus devalue just the one price, that of the currency. That also meaning defaulting on all that debt. Or it could stay in and have to go through an internal devaluation, all prices being forced down individually. Given the sacrosanct nature of the euro the second was forced upon them.
This was and is a disaster, the effect has been as bad as the Great Depression upon the United States and it's lasted for longer too. The correct answer was default and devaluation, the correct answer to what they should have done is still default and devaluation.
Don't let them convince us all that now growth is returning that the correct decision was made back then. It wasn't and we shouldn't forget that.