Trade: Exports (2010): $22 billion: manufactured goods, agricultural products, beverages, tobacco, petroleum products, cement, chemicals. Major markets--Germany, Italy, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Turkey, U.K., France, U.S., Romania, Spain. Imports (2010)--$64.55 billion: basic manufactures, food and animals, crude oil, chemicals, machinery, transport equipment. Major suppliers--Germany, Italy, China, France, Netherlands, U.S., Russia.

Assming the countries are listed in decreasing order of importance, Germany is both Greece's leading importer and exporter. Now we just need to find a source for the actual amounts.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

With bilateral trade worth more than EUR 8.5 billion, Germany is Greece's principal trading partner. German companies are among the most important foreign investors in the country. Over the past two years, Deutsche Telekom has gradually acquired a 40 per cent share in the semi-state-owned Greek telecommunications company OTE. In addition to companies including Siemens and Bayer that have been operating in Greece for many years, there has been a recent increased influx of retail companies like Lidl and Media-Saturn. Major infrastructure projects such as the Athens Metro and the new Athens airport have been conducted with the help of German companies. The 144 German companies operating in Greece employ a total workforce of approximately 37,000 and account for an annual turnover of some EUR 10.5 billion (German Federal Bank figures, as of April 2010).

Nice how they give the gross amount of bilateral trade, but not the net.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

Of those three, one is Germany and the other two (Finland and the Netherland - and Finland's inclusion on this list is actually questionable) are an order of magnitude (and some small change) smaller. As trade scales faster than linearly with size, Germany is well in excess of 80 % of the trade imbalance.

So for all practical purposes, yes, Greece's primary deficit went to German export companies.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

The percent of total German exports going to the Euro area as a whole has actually declined since the euro was introduced because the Euro area has grown more slowly than other regions. Germany's bilateral trade balance in goods with each of the GIIPS, however, has improved. For example, Greece's bilateral trade deficit with Germany widened from -1.5 percent of Greece's GDP in 1999 to -2.5 percent in 2008. Other core European countries, like the Netherlands, saw similar developments with the GIIPS, suggesting that all of the surplus countries benefited from increased demand in the weaker Euro area members.

The lie (sold most vehemently of all to the German public) is that austerity measures were every going to put Greece into a position to pay off it's debt.

What was needed was a short sharp ECB intervention at the beginning to show that it wasn't going to tolerate random speculation in Eurozone government bonds - and then an EU-wide dose of fiscal spending to dig Europe out of the worst situation since the Great Depression.

Ever since Austerity was chosen as the policy response, we've been locked into a death spiral. Many on this site (including me) kept hoping that we could break out of that - but the reality is as long as people keep pretending the Austerity could work in the middle of a Lesser Depression, the more doomed we are.