A former French economics minister, he was presiding over the 178-nation International Monetary Fund. The next day he would be departing New York on his way to Berlin to see the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to try and enlist her support for a plan he had devised, codenamed „Comprehensive“, to head off the impending disaster of a Greek default on its sovereign debt default. „If Germany backed it, the other European governments would follow,“ he explains in our interview. Otherwise, the crises „would quickly spiral out of control and spread to Spain, Italy and other Eurozone countries.“