Next month, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank (ECB) will report on their latest audit of Greece's national accounts. They will decide if Athens is establishing fiscal discipline and initiating the agreed process of raising money by privatising state assets.
They will also have probed whether there is any hope of eliminating Greece's endemic tax evasion, official corruption and fraud.
Greece is in a mess of its own making. It cooked the budgetary books when it was angling to join the eurozone 10 years ago, and has been profligate ever since. Low interest rates set by the ECB allowed cheap and progressive deficit financing - as in Spain, Portugal and Ireland.
When this proved unsustainable and Greece slithered towards sovereign debt default last year, the country was bailed out by selling low-interest bonds to the ECB, conditional on Athens slashing its budget deficit from more than 15% of GDP to single figures.
But the deficit remains above 10% and austerity measures introduced so far have again brought striking unionists onto the streets in protests that threaten Prime Minister George Papandreou's socialist government.
It's one thing for Greeks to demonstrate in favour of keeping social benefits such as state pensions at the age of 50, but frugal, hard-working Germans and Finns are up in arms. Why should German or Finnish taxes be diverted to pensions for indolent Greeks?
Papandreou might have political problems in Athens, but so too does chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. Playing to her domestic constituency, she has lambasted the Greeks, telling them to work harder, take fewer holidays and retire later.
The "borderline criminal" suggestion is that, outside the eurozone, Athens could devalue the drachma (which it cannot do with the euro) to engender economic competitiveness and then merrily trip along with its old fiscal indiscipline.
The suggestion is deceptively simple. But the country's debts would still be denominated in euros or dollars and represent an intolerable burden.
Any hint of quitting the euro would have Greeks yanking hard-currency euro deposits out of their country's banks, risking a banking collapse. Commercial banks could only turn to their own central bank for drachmas - they would be cut off from the ECB.
Alternatively, Athens could again ask the ECB to extend its bail-out loans beyond their 2013 maturity or default on its wider sovereign debt by repaying only cents in the dollar. This could exclude Greece from further foreign borrowing, forcing Athens to balance books.
Default would hammer the ECB and eurozone creditor banks with systemic banking risks. And debt "restructuring" would deflect Athens from making the economic adjustments demanded by finance ministers as a condition for allowing "restructuring".
When Standard & Poor's downgraded Greek bonds to near-junk status recently, the ratings agency said "restructuring" would be tantamount to default.
