The accepted reaction among BBC newsreaders to the Greek sovereign debt crisis seems to be that of exasperated parents faced with a stroppy six-year-old. They are clearly bored to tears with an endlessly repeated tale of austerity measures, riots, stalled negotiations and bail-outs. And back to the top and start again.

And news outlets around the globe know that repetitions of the same story quickly stop being news. So the random violence of bumbling terrorists in Bangkok gets front-page headlines for days while similar events in Pattani are reported in a ‘meanwhile …’ paragraph tacked on to a story on page 4.

BBC newsreader Naga Munchetty seems to think her job is more than looking presentable and reading from the teleprompter without tripping over too many syllables. She offered her experienced and well-considered opinion on the Greek problem. She would solve the crisis by ‘banging their heads together.’ The business reporter nodded in enthusiastic agreement.

There is a lot about this story that lends itself to a shallow interpretation like this. Greek economic figures were for years more a fiction of fudged statistics than fact (for which they had the expert, and expensive, advice of the likes of Goldman Sachs). Well it’s the Greeks, what do you expect? Liars, the lot of them. (Funny that no one seems to level the same charge at the investment bankers who took money for helping in the deceit.)

Then there’s the attitude of extremely wealthy Greeks (of whom there are not a few) towards paying taxes, which is something that only fools and poor people do (if there is any difference between the two groups). See? They’re all cheats as well.

And they joined the Eurozone so that when Germans came on holiday they could be charged German euro prices for Greek beer – isn’t that what the single market means? But then they found out that having debts in euros wasn’t quite like having debts in drachmas. In the good old days, when the creditors started banging on the doors, they just devalued the drachma; problem solved.

Greece can’t devalue the euro. The Greek economy is 2.5% of the Eurozone economy. If the euro seems overvalued in Athens, so what? Would the Bank of Thailand bother if Yasothon was feeling a credit squeeze?

So with an economy highly dependent on tourism and shipping, a global downturn that was almost perfectly designed to hit those industries particularly hard was enough to tip the Greek economy over the edge. To pay the bills, they borrowed. As recently as March 2010 an auction of Greek bonds had orders for three times the 5b euros then on offer. From the same investors now moaning about the ‘haircut’ of 50% and a bit that they are taking on their Greek debt.

But debt ballooned and started the cycle that evokes the sighs from BBC News’ pretty faces: flirting with default, promising austerity, provoking riots in the streets and eventually getting a bail-out that just kicks the can down the road so we can all start again in a few months.

Then I came across a wee detail about the latest ‘rescue’ package.

The European Central Bank (which constitutes one third of the ‘troika’ that has been violating Greek economic sovereignty day in day out by confiscating the Greek government’s cheque-book) will contribute to the bail-out. Now it can’t do this directly by lending funds to Greece. The wise brains that devised this institution outlawed that kind of help. So it will lend to the various central banks in the eurozone who can then lend on to Greece.

But what will it lend? Well it turns out that over the past 2 years, the ECB has bought about 38 million euros of Greek government bonds. And it will ‘donate’ the profit from this. That profit is 12 million euros.

If we make the conservative assumption that they bought the whole lot at the beginning of the 2 years (which is incorrect but I have no more detailed figures), then this represents annual interest of at least 15%.

Nice work if you can get it.

Now the Prime Minister selected by someone else has just imposed on the Greek people (those lying, cheating shysters, you recall) the 5th austerity package inside 2 years. This includes cutting the minimum wage by 22%, abolition of bonuses, 15,000 more public sector jobs to go (and 10 times that by 2015); more pension cuts; privatization of utilities; increased ‘labour flexibility’ (i.e. easier sackings); opening previously protected professions to foreign competition; and more rioting. (No, that last one’s not part of the demands; it comes as a sort of obligatory extra.)

All of this is designed to save the Greek government the princely sum of 3.3 billion euros this year. 3.3 billion euros is what they’ve been paying the ECB in interest every 7 months or so, let alone what the rest of the debt is costing them. And the ECB still holds the original 50 billion in bonds.

The choice doesn’t seem very difficult. Beggar yourself for a generation or more. Or stop paying off the loan sharks.

But then someone, invited precisely because of his hard-headed knowledge of the financial world, had the audacity to suggest exactly this on the BBC news.

The stroppy six-year-old had just peed on the carpet. Hands went up, a collective intake of horrified breath. ‘You can’t do that,’ said the BBC faces. And they haven’t.