Questão 80 - UNIFESO 2012/1

It´s time to stop kidding ourselves about Greece. In

Wonderland, the White Queen told Alice that believing “six

impossible things before breakfast” is quite in order; but in

Europe it is not. Over the past 18 months, the fiction that

[5]  chronically dysfunctional, spendthrift Greece could, even

with massive handouts, reform its way back to economic

health has cost Europe´s taxpayers billions. Worse still, it

magnified the risks to the euro that they sought to avoid.

If the idea was that pouring money into Greece

[10]  would divert attention from Portugal, Spain, or Italy, the

strategy backfired; financial markets reasoned that if

politicians lacked the courage to face the facts in Greece,

what confidence could there be that peer pressure would

compel Italy and Spain to put their appalling finances in

[15]  order? The more Merkel and Sarkozy insist that Greece´s

future lies squarely within the eurozone, the more they put

the euro at risk.

The only uncertainties now are the terms of a Greek

default, what the wider damage will be, and how to limit it.

[20]  The fact that politicians have painted default as an

unthinkable catastrophe does not help. It will be messy –

yet no less messy than the political confusion that has

stymied decisions for the past 18 months.

(from How this Greek Tragedy Will End by Rosemary Righter in NEWSWEEK, September 26,2011)

According to paragraph 1, we infer that