What do Greece, Ireland and the United States have in common?

Each experienced what was termed at the time a "new financial era" that produced an enormous expansion of its finance sector. This led to an intoxicating combination of aggressive lending, leverage and recklessness. In each case, the era ended in a financial crisis; perhaps most important, each crisis ended with a bailout of lenders, bondholders and bankers.

This hat trick of bank bailouts hasn't gone unnoticed in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis, who just resigned as finance minister of Greece, might be a provocateur, but he is apparently no fool. Earlier Monday, in a blog post, he said "the Greek 'bailouts' were exercises whose purpose was intentionally to transfer private losses onto the shoulders of the weakest Greeks, before being transferred to other European taxpayers."