In July 2010, Lagarde, who was France’s finance minister at the time, recognized the damage incurred by those initial delays, “If we had been able to address [Greece’s debt] right from the start, say in February, I think we would have been able to prevent it from snowballing the way that it did.” Even the IMF acknowledged that it had been a mistake not to impose losses on private creditors preemptively; it finally did so only in June 2013, when the damage had already been done.