Temerile privind ieşirea Greciei din zona euro şi a intrării ţării în incapacitate de plată au determinat la sfârşitul lui 2009 transferarea unor mari sume de bani peste hotare, proces care a durat până în iunie 2012, când a început restabilirea încrederii în Grecia.

Din cele 115 miliarde de euro, aproximativ 50 miliarde de euro au revenit în sistemul bancar elen, arată studiul Băncii centrale, care indică că pierderea netă de capitală pentru bănci se ridică la 56,8 miliarde de euro.

În condiţiile în care suma necesară pentru acoperirea necesităţilor de finanţare ale persoanelor fizice şi juridice se ridică la 24,3 miliarde de euro, conform calculelor publicaţiei Kathimerini, aproximativ site-32,5 miliarde de euro au fost transferaţi peste hotare şi încă 19 miliarde de euro, aparţinând unor cetăţeni străini, au fost scoși din băncile elene în timpul perioadei de vârf a crizei datoriilor.

Banii din băncile elene au fost transferaţi în Marea Britanie 10-15 miliarde de euro, Germania  - opt miliarde de euro, Olanda 6-10 miliarde de euro şi Elveţia 2-4 miliarde de euro. Alte şapte miliarde de euro au fost transferate în Cipru, dar au rămas acolo doar 1,5 - 2 miliarde de euro, arată datele publicate de Banca Centrală a Greciei.

National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank, Eurobank Ergasias şi Alpha Bank, care împreună controlează aproximativ 90% din industria bancară grecească, au fost sprijinite de Uniunea Europeană şi Fondul Monetar Internaţional care, în cadrul programului de asistenţă financiară a Greciei, au pus deoparte 50 de miliarde de euro pentru curăţarea sectorului bancar elen.

Principalele bănci din Grecia sunt prezente şi pe piaţa din România: National Bank of Greece, acţionar majoritar la Banca Românească, EFG Eurobank, care controlează Bancpost, Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank şi ATE Bank, fostă Mindbank.

More than a half-billion dollars (nearly 200 billion yen) of Japanese taxpayer money has been wasted in the struggle to contain and cleanup the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster, according to a government audit.  Japan’s Board of Audit reported that TEPCO, the company nominally in charge of the crippled facility, along with other construction and utility giants, had operated an insular and insufficiently transparent process that resulted in a lengthy list of massive expenditures on untested tactics and shoddy equipment.  The biggest ticket failure was apparently a $270 million water decontamination system from French nuclear behemoth Areva. Designed to remove radioactive cesium from water gushing from Fukushima Daiichi’s three destroyed reactors, the machine was never fully operational, functioned only three months, and processed only 77,000 tons of liquid — in total — a minute fraction of the 300,000 tons of contaminated water flowing from the site (and into the sea) each day.  An attempt to contain at least some of that water, a series of pipes and trenches filled with coolant that was to form an “ice wall,” turned out to be another of the cleanup’s dramatically costly and utterly ineffective schemes.  As detailed last summer, the freezing technique was borrowed from tunnel excavation, but had never been tried under such circumstances or on such a large scale. After a year of planning and months of construction, authorities couldn’t get even the small first stage of the project to freeze. Even after adding ten tons of ice and a ton of dry ice on top of the piped coolant every day, TEPCO could not get within 10 degrees (F) of the temperature needed to form a barrier.  By late 2014, 400 tons of ice and somewhere between $840,000 (audited waste) and $300 million (projected cost) later, TEPCO conceded failure.  Other attempts to contain the radioactive water have also come at immense cost. TEPCO spent $134 million on rubber-gasketed tanks that quickly began leaking into the surrounding ground and ocean. And $18 million was spent to build large underground pools that failed within weeks.  Another costly boondoggle detailed in the audit is the $150 million blown on desalination equipment that was supposed to purify the seawater poured over the overheating reactor cores. (All of Fukushima’s cooling systems failed during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, resulting in reactor meltdowns, melt-throughs, hydrogen explosions and containment breaches.) One machine worked for just five days; the best of them survived only six weeks.  Fukushima’s disaster mitigation is four years into what is projected, by the very best estimates, to be a 30- to 40-year cleanup — and even then, there will be many long-term logistical, safety and health concerns. No serious models forecast the project can be accomplished with just $1.6 billion, but by that math, waste alone will outstrip the budget three- or four-times over before cleanup is “complete.”