Euclid Tsakalotos, Greece’s new finance minister, was in the global spotlight this week as the man ”in charge of saving the euro,” as he tries to negotiate with his country’s creditors. This morning, however, attention turned away from Tsakalotos’s economic policies and toward his handwriting. More specifically, his signature:
Tsakalotos’s mark will grace numerous documents in the ongoing process of resolving the Greek debt crisis—and perhaps even the new drachma if Greece leaves the euro.
The laughs over its appearance are reminiscent of the reactions to the signature of newly named US treasury secretary Jack Lew in 2013. Lew “has the world’s worst signature,” New York magazine reported, “and pretty soon, that signature could be on every single one of your dollar bills.”
Lew ended up using a more conventional signature in the end. Tsakalotos—who also used several less distinctive signatures in the same document where the suggestive one appeared (pdf)—would be well advised to do the same.