The Greek crisis has become a kind of political Rorschach ink-blot test – you see blame where you want to.

Depending on your point of view, Greece is either a feckless nation of scroungers holding referendums on whether the rest of Europe should be sending more money to pay for overly-generous pensions, or a semi-serf state struggling under the indentured yoke of its neo-colonial paymasters.

Similarly, Germany is either a generous benefactor obeying the rules of the eurozone and pushing for necessary structural reforms to the Greek economy, or it is a jack-booted bully trampling democracy in the only nation that has had the temerity to question the transparently self-defeating doctrine of austeritypour encourager les autres.

Impartial observers, if there are any left at this stage, must find themselves hopelessly oscillating between multiple points of view depending on how the facts are framed.

Yes, Greece has one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world. But, thanks to various past restructurings, it also has one of the lowest interest payments to GDP ratios in the eurozone.

Yes, some of the bail-out money that Greece received has flowed straight out of the country and into the coffers of foreign banks. But Greece was running a deficit of more than 10pc of GDP even when the financial crisis hit and would be in an even deeper hole without the eurozone’s largesse.

Yes, the latest deal is an amaroidal defeat for Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister. But it is also a colossal political gamble for the creditor nations (Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, frankly admitted on Monday that he will break his electoral promises when contributing to a new aid package of €86bn [£60bn] over the next three years).

Yes, the transfer of state-owned assets into a special fund for future sales is a humiliating affront to Greek sovereignty. But it is also a necessary precaution against Greek clientelism, Tsipras’s serial bluff tactics and Syriza’s ideological opposition to privatisation.

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of The Telegraph's article.

The good news from this Greek-EU saga is that global investors gained another chance to buy European stocks more cheaply before Mario Draghi’s QE of €60bn a month floated them higher. 

However, the underlying story remains disturbing, as I have discussed here and in Audios over the last few weeks.  It reminds me of the classic 1975 film: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson.   

As to why Alexis Tsipras and his colleagues did not actually take the Grexit route, as they were none too subtly advised to, I suspect they were too depressed and lacked the confidence or experience to follow that route.