I don't see this as an economic problem but as a moral problem. If they had applied a stimulus program in Greece instead of austerity, maybe the economic contraction wouldn't be too big, but there would still be some. In corrupted countries neither austerity or stimulus are the solution. The solution is not an economic one, but a moral one. Iceland solution, which is so much used as an example in these discussions, wasn't an economic one of defaulting on their debt, but of jailing corrupt bankers, putting the blame in the right places, taking out the defective cogs out of the great system and adding mechanisms to prevent new defective cogs from appearing. The defaulting is a consequence of that, not the reason. A stimulus program in Greece wouldn't do much neither, because most of the money would be concentrated in a few corrupted pockets instead of trickling down to a large amount of the population.