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This policy brief reexamines the effects of the Greek austerity experiment on its economy via a counterfactual analysis. We combine the fiscal multipliers from the meta regression analysis in Gechert and Rannenberg (2014) to the fiscal consolidation measures that have been implemented in Greece between 2010 and 2014. We estimate that austerity explains almost the entire collapse of Greek GDP after 2009. This result suggests that–ceteris paribus–, in the absence of austerity, the Greek economy would have entered a prolonged period of stagnation, rather than a depression. At the same time the path of the government debt-to-GDP ratio would have been only somewhat higher. Furthermore, we estimate that if the consolidation would have been postponed until after the recovery of the Greek economy and implemented gradually, almost 80 percent of the cost in terms of lost output could have been avoided. Our …