AT FIRST sight, Greece's debt crisis has taken another turn for the worse. Yields on its government bonds have soared, rising above 20% on two-year paper on April 18th. But what seems to be bad news may in fact be good.

Greek bond yields are spiking because European policymakers now seem to be acknowledging what this newspaper has long argued was inevitable: Greece's debt will need to be restructured. Even Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's finance minister, appears to be open to the idea. The official line, admittedly, remains that restructuring is not an option; and the European Central Bank still has its head firmly in the sand. But the debate in Europe is finally shifting from how to avoid a Greek restructuring to how to do it (see article).

This is to be welcomed—but with a reservation: even as Europe's leaders start to consider restructuring, there are worrying signs that they will shrink from doing it boldly enough. That is because the continent's politicians are not chiefly motivated by the desire to cut Greece's debt burden to a sustainable level. The Germans, in particular, have two concerns closer to home. The first is to minimise Greece's need for more cash from German taxpayers: the current plan is for Greece to return to the markets next year, which is plainly implausible. The second is to protect German banks, many of which hold Greek bonds, which makes them reluctant to accept any debt write-down. These two concerns point to a modest “reprofiling”, which temporarily defers Greece's debt payments but does not come close to restoring its solvency. Realisation would merely be postponed.

Follow Brady, not Baker

The debate about Greece now has a Latin American dimension. Those who favour deferral point to Uruguay. In 2003 the small Latin American country convinced its creditors to swap their bonds for new ones with the same principal, same interest rates and five years' longer maturity. That reduced the effective burden of the South American country's debt by around 15% at little cost: soon afterwards it was borrowing again in international markets. Greece, goes the hope in Berlin, could do the same. Putting off bond repayments for a few years would mean that the official rescue funds would last longer. You could lean on financial regulators to allow Europe's banks to continue valuing their bonds at par.

The trouble is that Greece in 2011 is not Uruguay in 2003. Greece's debt stock, set to reach 160% of GDP in 2012, is almost twice as high as Uruguay's was. Greece is unlikely to enjoy a fortunate run of strong economic growth, as Uruguay has, clocking up a rate of 6.1% a year thanks to the global commodity boom. Modest reprofiling will not, therefore, put Greece's public finances onto a sustainable footing. At best it will buy time. A deeper reduction, not deferral, is needed.

A more accurate and worrying Latin American parallel is the debt crises of the 1980s. Greece is bust, just as Mexico (followed by several others) was in 1982. The exposure of America's big banks to Latin America was enormous; formal write-downs of debt would have left many of them insolvent. A plan named after James Baker, then America's treasury secretary, offered the Latin Americans a temporary rescheduling (similar in spirit to the sort of scheme being discussed for the Greeks today). It gave the American banks more time to recover, but Latin America's economies buckled under the burden of debts that could not be repaid. In 1989 another plan, named after another treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, provided the necessary debt reduction. But Latin America lost a decade. In 1992 income per person was still lower than ten years before.

Greece needs a Brady plan, not a Baker one. Such a restructuring would hurt some European banks, especially Greek ones, which would need extra official help. Overall the hit to Europe's banks is manageable, and it is far better to push them to boost their capital than to pretend unpayable debt is whole. None of this will be easy to sell to voters (Finnish ones vented their anger this week—see article). But the longer that politicians lie to them about reality, the angrier they will get.

The reality is that Greece's debt burden needs to fall by at least half. European officials could offer a menu of ways to achieve that: reducing the principal owed, cutting interest rates or radically lengthening maturities. They could sweeten the terms with guarantees, as the Brady bonds did, and offer investors a share in any Greek recovery with warrants related to the country's future economic growth. The interest rates on new official loans might also be made contingent on growth rates. There are creative ways to make default less painful; trying to pretend it will not happen is not one of them.