How Debt-Ravaged Greece Aced a Financial-Literacy Survey

Greece is in such financial turmoil that its people are rioting in the streets and the country risks being tossed from Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. Yet in a recent personal-financial-literacy assessment, the Greek people were found to be the most savvy in all of Europe. This seemingly impossible finding comes from ING Investment Management, which polled 5,500 adults in 11 nations and found that Greek “retail investors” scored the highest marks. The poll asked 13 questions about retirement savings, mortgages, credit cards, bank savings accounts and the stock market. The Greeks, a people long dependent on state entitlements but now experiencing massive pension-and-salary cuts, have had virtually no grounding in personal finance. In interviews with Athens bankers this fall, the only shred of financial education I could uncover was the recent opening of the National Museum of Economic History. I wrote at the time: Amid this upheaval, there’s been little effort to join the global financial-literacy movement. The private-banking industry sponsors a Junior Achievement program geared toward high school students. But there’s been little penetration. In many schools, the teachers are so disgusted with bankers that they won’t let volunteers visit their classrooms. Meanwhile, the government is preoccupied with recapitalizing its banks and saving the economy. It’s done almost nothing on the financial-education front. (MORE: The Office Holiday Party Survival Guide) How can the Greeks ace a financial-literacy test? The answer is they can’t; they just did better than everyone else. On average, Europeans answered correctly on 6.2 of the 13 questions, down from 6.8 in the same survey two years earlier. These results are in line with dismal financial-literacy scores in the U.S. In the ING survey, 24% of Greeks were found to have good or excellent command of personal financial issues, followed by: U.K., 22% Netherlands, 22% Hungary, 15% Czech Republic, 14% Romania, 12% Bulgaria, 12% Poland, 11% Slovakia, 9% Spain, 9% Turkey, 7% While in Europe I also interviewed Spanish bankers about their nation’s financial-education efforts, which are considerable. Yet Spain polled second to last. As

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