No, I think you are being too charitable to banks here. Just answer this: where did the bailout money go? Who has it now? Describe to me the flow of money and you'll see that it went to service debt that was held in large part by private institutions.
Even if I agree with your argument, I guess what we should say is that the haircut wasn't enough. The lenders should have lost all their money because they debtors are insolvent. There was no reason to involve taxpayer money in this mess.
The debt is held by public institutions, and what money Greece receives from those institutions is going overwhelmingly back to those institutions.
> The lenders should have lost all their money
"The lenders" are mostly the Troika, and always has been. You seem to be working on a mental model where most Greek debt in foreign hands is owned by private banks (or was owned by private banks, or was originally lent by private banks). Not so.
> There was no reason to involve taxpayer money in this mess.
Also untrue. A currency union ABSOLUTELY requires large fiscal transfers from richer to poorer regions, probably in the neighbourhood of 30% of GDP for a region like Europe. This has been known for decades. EU taxpayer money was on the hook from the moment the Euro project started. (If EU voters were never told that, that's a separate issue.)
You have not done what I asked, which is to mark the flow of money to establish your point, nor have you cited a single source apart from Wikipedia. Let me do it for you. Here's an article from WP that claims most bailout money went to pay off bondholders who were in large part european banks and pension funds. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/most-greek-ba...
Do you have an agenda here? You seem to be repeating the same thing over and over without providing any sources.
To your second point, sure. Why are taxpayers in Germany crying about it now? Let them lubricate their eyes instead with the inevitability of fiscal transfer.
In any case, I am not interested in debating this issue. My concern in the original post was the moral discourse surrounding debt, that treats the rhetoric of the moneylender to be the dominant rhetoric.
I've provided several sources, which you haven't bothered to try and dispute. Your WaPo link disagrees with nothing I've said.
You asked why people are talking about taxpayers having to bail Greece out, and why we don't try and punish the banks. The answer is because the debt is overwhelmingly owned by taxpayers, not banks[1]. (Which, in turn, is in large part because in 2012 we punished the banks still holding Greek debt pretty severely.)
If you persist in thinking that foreign banks hold the bulk of Greek debt, or that no haircut ever happened, then EU politics will continue to be a mystery to you.
> > You asked why people are talking about taxpayers having to bail Greece out, and why we don't try and punish the banks.
>Now you're just claiming I said stuff I never said.
Oh really?
> More often than not, you'll hear stuff like: [...] "Why should taxpayers bail Greece out?"...
All the while, there is absolute ZERO condemnation for banking entities making risky loans. There is not even a tacit nod towards acknowledging that if banks make loans that fail, it is their loss to eat.
Even if I agree with your argument, I guess what we should say is that the haircut wasn't enough. The lenders should have lost all their money because they debtors are insolvent. There was no reason to involve taxpayer money in this mess.