Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair in 2010 Explained the Role of the Monks in the Vatopaidi Monastery in the Greek Debt Crisis

And now the crisis has come to a head. Nearly five years ago Michael Lewis in a brilliant article in Vanity Fair in 2010 explained the role of the monks in the Vatopaidi Monastery in the Greek Debt Crisis ("Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds").

Apparently the monks engage in more than prayer and contemplation.

The article summary says:

As Wall Street hangs on the question “Will Greece default?,” the author heads for riot-stricken Athens, and for the mysterious Vatopaidi monastery, which brought down the last government, laying bare the country’s economic insanity. But beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

It's an indictment of the country as a whole, with a clear explanation for how things got so bad in Greece, and with clever insights like this caption to the picture above:

VOW OF PROPERTY - Father Arsenios at the Vatopaidi monastery, overlooking the Aegean Sea, in Mount Athos, Greece. He is considered by many to be Vatopaidi’s C.F.O., “the real brains of the operation.”