Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well ... the essential problem of course is that Greece can't pay its debts. We have the recession; we have a problem in Greece of collecting taxes, quite frankly, and the Greeks have voted a lot of big spending programs, so they are almost insolvent.

"They are part, however, of the greater European community. And this shows, I think, one of the potentially disadvantages of that community in that in the old days before the European community one way out for Greece would have been simply for the Greeks to print more money. Their money was called a drachma, and they could have simply printed more money to pay off their debts.

"Now this would have caused higher inflation in Greece, so the Greek people of course would have paid a cost. But it would also have made Greece more competitive because their exports would have been cheaper. But Greece can't do that now because they don't control their currency. Their ... currency, of course, is the euro; it's controlled by the European Central Bank. And so the supply of their money is not under their control.

"So in some sense this is the first problem we have seen of a country that doesn't really follow the rules of keeping their budget in balance, and yet they don't have this safety net, if you will, their money supply.

"And the European community is going to have to work this out. Because Greeks -- Greece is not the only country that has this problem. There are some others. And this may not be the only time that it happens.

"So again, I think one lesson here is the importance to a country of controlling its own currency."