Hi Letta,
I studied the Greek crisis last year in law school and it became very clear that our news media did nothing to show to the intimate connection between Goldman Sacs, the impact of US corporate powers and its morally bankrupt dealings; basically how Wall street screwed not only American citizens but the entire world. I think the majority of Americans have no idea what life is really like in Greece. I would love to know from you what the climate is like. How are young people doing?
This is from http://theamericanscholar.org/too-bad-not-to-fail/:
"European banks, including the German state bank, bought the securities from Goldman, which neglected to tell the Europeans that the mortgages were selected on the basis of probable failure, according to the SEC. Within nine months of their creation, 99 percent of the CDOs were downgraded. The European banks lost $1 billion, the hedge-fund operator made $1 billion, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Goldman morally bankrupt. Derivatives had created a culture in which morality was unimportant."
This is probably more info than needed but here is an excerpt out of some reading I did which shed light on how the Euro is not the answer:
"If Greece were the sole country to have run into trouble, one could argue that it was solely Greece’s problem and not the euro’s.6 But one country after another has shown signs of trouble. There were problems lurking in the background that surfaced with the financial crisis and the recession that followed. Greece’s problem was its fiscal policy and external public debt coupled with diminishing international competitiveness. Ireland, judging from its pre-crisis debt-to-GDP ratio, was the most fiscally responsible country of the Eurozone. The culprits there turned out to be private over-indebtedness and its property bubble that led to problems with its banks, followed by the guarantees its government gave to the banks. Portugal had moderate debt-to-GDP ratios but through contagion it was perceived by the bond markets to be the weakest of the rest in terms of
6 The next three paragraphs are partly based on Skaperdas (2011).
9
size, low growth, and fiscal vulnerabilities. Spain was also nearly as fiscally responsible as Ireland and it also suffered from a property bubble and high private debt. Italy has suffered from high public debt and persistently low growth over the past decade.
Greece was the biggest violator of the Stability and Growth Pact’s budget deficit limits and had the highest public debt. The Irish and Spanish crises can be considered largely an outcome of the unclear supervision of, and gaps in responsibilities for, the banks. Portugal has been a victim of the general economic malaise that it has experienced since adopting the euro and the power of the bond “vigilantes,” perhaps more so than any of the other countries since there was nothing specifically that was done wrong. But all countries experiencing a crisis have had, since the introduction of the euro, a large expansion of overall indebtedness, whether primarily public or private, that was accompanied by an increase in their current account deficits. Over the same time period, these deficits were matched by an increase in Germany’s current account surplus.7
For the Eurozone, the problem is not Greek government profligacy or Irish carelessness. If Ireland or Greece were not part of the Eurozone, another peripheral country would get into trouble sooner than later. The problem is structural: the weakness of institutions for a monetary union that consists of such diverse and heterogeneous countries that have no independent economic tools other than wage and price adjustments that have been historically known to be crude instruments.8 The creators of the euro saw it as primarily a political project, as a back-door way of forcing political integration. Political integration, however, never took off the ground and now we have the rather predictable results."
Greece 
United States