For months, the idea that the British economy needs to avoid the kind of collapse of confidence suffered by Greece has been used by the Conservatives to stiffen our resolve to put up with tough measures.
On election day itself, the Daily Mail reported: "Britain was given an election wake-up call today after Greece's battle with massive debterupted in blood and anarchy ... With 'contagion' from Athens threatening to spread through other debt-laden economies, David Cameron made a last-ditch plea to voters to back a strong Tory government."
But the story hasn't always been taken at face value. A month later, even the loyal Daily Telegraph published a sceptical commentary by Danny Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and Elias Papaioannou, a former economist at the European Central Bank - and a Greek:
"Proposing the same medicine in the UK as in Greece, though at a lower dose, seems a priori absurd, as the problems are fundamentally different because the two countries suffer from different pathologies.
The Greek crisis is the result of a steady loss of competitiveness, reflected in a ballooning trade deficit and relatively high inflation, and a rapid expansion of public sector spending.
Greece is characterised by endemic tax evasion, a poor tax collection infrastructure, parochial patronage policies, corruption and huge delays in the administrative courts dealing with tax disputes. This clearly does not resemble developments in the UK."
For a more colourful account of the extremes of the Greek economy, try Michael Lewis' in last month's Vanity Fair - where the former New York investment banker documents the culture of inefficiency with affectionate incredulity:
"Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe's bankers, they did not buy US subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government - where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks."
With the Coalition's spending plans now in the works, it would be politically convenient to be able to continue to point to somewhere like Greece as a kind of economic memento mori. But the Greek crisis seems to have gone off the boil.
Less convenient in defence of government policy is the emerging focus on Ireland - because Ireland's financial crisis looks increasingly like a case of the cure being worse than the disease, and the cure looks suspiciously like the one we are being administered.
In today's FT, Gillian Tett reports on a visit, in the most sympathetic terms:
"Pity the Irish. In the past 18 months, Dublin has repeatedly unveiled commendably bold measures to fight financial crisis. First, it offered to guarantee the banks. Then it replaced its top regulator and central bank governor, and embarked on an unusually forceful effort to inject transparency into its troubled banks.
More remarkable still, it has also imposed a painful austerity plan, in a bid to reduce debt.
... Yet, instead of being rewarded by the markets, Ireland is now in the crosshairs. Ten-year government bond yields have just surged above 8%. Hedge funds in places such as New York are forecasting a default. And, on a visit to Dublin this week, I bumped into several distressed debt experts, some of whom joked that 'Ireland is now even worse than Greece'. And not just because of the weather."
The problems are complex - the kind for which our business glossary is required. Tett talks about "jingle mail" ("A situation where a homeowner mails his or her house keys to a mortgage lender due to an inability to meet mortgage payment obligations and a lack of equity in the property" according to Investopedia) and "credit haircuts" (nothing to do with Danny Alexander's?).
The bottom line - so to speak - is that we may be in transition from a time when the government tries to scare us by pointing to Greece, to one in which the Opposition tries to scare us by pointing to Ireland.
But you don't even need a clue about credit haircuts to realise that easy analogies between one country's finances and another's reveal far more about politics than economics.
