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crisis conclusively; it would serve only to buy a little time for Greece. The matter would inevitably raise its head once again; under a worstcase scenario this might afford Greece a year, while at best it could provide four. At that juncture, the same questions would remain: who would provide Greece with capital, and under what terms? Commentary in the international press concurred with such an analysis: ‘the European Union delays surgery with painkillers’.5 ‘Any solution must be a long-term one and get to the root of the evil.’6 According to the New York Times
the time the second deal was signed on January 14, 1998, to 115 bullet points by the third deal in April 1998. Why did the IMF pursue such a radical surgery? The prevalent view within the Fund was that in this era of high capital mobility and market integration, it was impossible to fix the international financial system without simultaneously fixing the domestic microeconomic structures of crisisaffected countries. Hence, stabilizing a country’s financial system necessitated institutional reforms that extended well beyond the traditional monetary, fiscal and exchange