Indebted governments would be able to transfer debt in excess of a 60% of national income or GDP to a debt reduction fund which would agree to freeze the money owed for 10 years in return for the government carrying out agreed economic reform.

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The president does not have discretion under the Constitution to refuse to pay interest and principle on the national debt, including the Social Security trust fund bonds, as long as he has the money to do so, which he would even without an increase in the debt limit, or taxes, as explained above.

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This 17bn euros of loans from the eurozone and International Monetary Fund would have taken Cyprus's national debt to 145% of its GDP, or economic output, which was seen by eurozone finance ministers as unsustainably high.

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By the end of the wars, the government was borrowing all of the money for the fund from the same markets that the fund bought from, in the deluded belief that reinvesting the interest on the bonds held by the fund would yield compound returns sufficient to pay off the whole of the national debt.

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