  Third, the commitment by the Greek government to reduce the fiscal deficit from last year’s 13.6 per cent of GDP to 8 per cent this year and below 3 per cent in 2013, and the 110-billion euro support package agreed between the Greek government and the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF, are unprecedented in terms of magnitudes.
I have no doubt that the government will take whatever measures are needed to attain its fiscal objectives to ensure fiscal sustainability. It will, however, take some time to convince the markets of the government’s determination to achieve those goals. Decades of fiscal mismanagement and faulty fiscal reporting have caused the markets to adopt Saint Thomas’s dictum: to see is to believe.