It actually needed even more than it got, and an analysis of why the program was inadequate would be very interesting, if anyone would ever stop going on about debt/GDP ratios and write one. But the reason why it didn’t get adequate fiscal financing doesn’t look to me like something that can be blamed on the Euroland sovereigns overruling the poor Cassandra-like IMF. The IMF’s fiscal consolidation targets were the part of the 2010 program which everybody, wrongly, agreed on. If the idea is that creating a second banking crisis in Euroland would have made it more possible for the troika to lend money up front, this needs to be argued for. Orphanides doesn’t even assume this; he just shows a graph of the primary balance adjustment and its consequences, then goes away talking about the debt levels as if they were the same thing.