Varoufakis: Greece should have gone bankrupt

Greece should have been allowed to go bankrupt and move on from the crisis, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has told a German tabloid.

"As for the Greek banks and state, they should not have been saved - we should have been allowed to go bankrupt, suffer the consequences but then be allowed to pick ourselves up and move on," Varoufakis told Bild in a lengthy interview from his summer home on the island of Aegina.

The former minister said Greece, which formally exited the bailout programme on Monday, is in the "same black hole" as it was a decade ago and that "it keeps sinking deeper into it every day."

"Despite two debt cuts over several billion euros, the debts have grown: the state is still broke, private citizens have become poorer, companies still go bankrupt, and our gross national product has decreased by 25 percent… Everybody owes money to...