By John Cassidy, Jul. 3, 2015, The New Yorker

Just when you thought that the Greece saga had run out of plot twists, another one emerged on Thursday—and it was an important one. A few days before a referendum that will probably decide the fate of Greece’s Syriza government, one of the country’s creditors, the International Monetary Fund, came out and acknowledged that the stricken country is unlikely to recover until a good portion of its huge debt load is wiped out.

Echoing the argument that Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s controversial finance minister, has been making for months, the I.M.F. published an internal analysis that described Greece’s debt dynamics as “unsustainable.” At a minimum, the analysis said, the maturity dates of Greece’s loans, which total more than three hundred billion euros, “will need to be extended significantly.” And if Greece doesn’t push through all of the structural and fiscal reforms that the Fund believes are necessary, “haircuts on debt will become necessary.” (A “haircut” is the financial term for reducing the face value of outstanding debt. If you owned a $1,000 bond and it was subjected to a haircut of ten per cent, it would entitle you to collect just $900 when it became due.)