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Troika Exploits Greek Bank Run As Varoufakis Slams “Pernicious” Banking Sector “Leaks”
Troika Exploits Greek Bank Run As Varoufakis Slams “Pernicious” Banking Sector “Leaks”
As expected, no progress was made between Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis and EU finance ministers at Thursday’s Eurogroup meeting in Luxembourg. Varoufakiswarned his counterparts that Europe was very close to “accepting” a Greek “accident”, something the FinMin said EU officials have a “moral duty” to avoid before “uncontrollable events” occur. Varoufakis also implicitly accused the troika of attempting to incite a bank run.
While it wasn’t entirely clear what Varoufakis meant by “uncontrollable events,” it seems likely he’s referencing the fact that while politicians may be able to push back their own self-imposed deadlines as many times as they wish even to the point of rendering the entire effort “ridiculous”, — to use German Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s words — the reality on the ground in Greece is that the economy is collapsing on itself and deposit flight is now running above at €750 million euros each day. Put simply: an acute crisis of confidence among the Greek populace now risks plunging the country into a state of emergency.
In an attempt to address the quickly deteriorating situation, Brussels looks set to impose capital controls as early as this weekend and has scheduled an emergency summit on Monday. EU finance ministers will reportedly hold another meeting ahead of the summit. WSJ has more:
Eurozone leaders will try to clinch a deal on Greece’s flailing bailout at a hastily called crisis summit Monday, after finance ministers failed again to bridge the gap between Athens and its lenders.
The summit—eight days before Greece’s eurozone rescue runs out—will be one of the last chances to avert the specter of further economic meltdown for Greece and a messy exit from the eurozone.
After five months of fraught negotiations, “it is time to urgently discuss the situation of Greece at the highest political level,” said Donald Tusk, who presides over meetings of European leaders.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Calm Reigns” Everywhere As Greece Inches Closer To Default, China Crashes
“Calm Reigns” Everywhere As Greece Inches Closer To Default, China Crashes
In what is perhaps the most glaring instance of central bank intervention yet,Reuters today captured the market mood as follows: “Calm ruled Europe’s stock and currency markets on Friday as Greece inched closer to a default later this month….the euro was down just 0.3 percent against the dollar and major European stock markets gained in early trade.” Why is Europe (and by extension US futures) so desperate to show green today even with a Greek default imminent? The same reason we explained back in January when we said the ECB and the Fed would do everything in their power to eliminate all Greek “negotiating” leverage which from day one was the attempt to create market contagion from Grexit. Unfortunately for Greece, the ECB’s QE intervened and blew a hole right through its plans, and now, it finds that not only do markets not care about the Greek contagion about which even Janet Yellen warned, but in the US hit all time highs!
The inverse, however, is certainly not true as ECB “sources” leak each and every day just how bad the Greek bank run is, and promptly put this information into the public domain in hopes of accelerating the already terminal bank run which unless halted will lead to capital controls and ultimately the fall of the Tsipras regime: precisely what the Troika has been after all along, as we also explained all the wayback in February. Sure enough, just a few hours ago Reuters “sources” reportedthat after €2 billion exited the Greek financial system in the first three days of the week, on Thursday the outflow hit what may have been a record €1 billion in one day.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
LEAKED (Denied then Confirmed): ECB Not Sure If Greek Banks Can Open Monday
LEAKED (Denied then Confirmed): ECB Not Sure If Greek Banks Can Open Monday
There seems to be a growing willingness in the Eurozone to get this over with, to let Greece default and go from there – with all the options that this might entail. But even if a last-minute bailout agreement materializes, one thing stands out in this sea of chaotic uncertainty: Greek banks are toast.
The top four – National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank, Alpha Bank, and Eurobank Ergasias – account for 91% of Greek banking assets. They’ve already been bailed out twice. Their shares are penny stocks. They have two toxic problems: liquidity and solvency. Either one can topple them.
Liquidity is a problem because the Greeks have zero trust in their banks and have been yanking their euros out with increasing desperation. They won’t ever forget what happened to depositors in Cyprus. Deposits have plunged about 20% since November, to €130 billion. According to Reuters, “banking sources” said that just during the first three days of this week, Greeks have pulled €2 billion from their accounts – about €667 million a day, compared to prior weeks when they’d withdrawn €200 to €300 million a day.
Meanwhile, funding from central banks has jumped to over €120 billion: €40 billion from the ECB directly; and €83 billion via the Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) through the Bank of Greece. Thus, deposits and central-bank funding are rapidly approaching a dreadful level: parity.
“There’s a real possibility they’ll fold, not just Greece but the banks themselves,” Fitch Managing Director James Longsdon told CNBC.
And ELA, the lifeblood of Greek banks, is conditioned on two things: available collateral and solvency.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Inciting Bank Runs as a Negotiating Tactic
Inciting Bank Runs as a Negotiating Tactic
The troika of Greek creditors has gone into full-frontal morals-be-damned attack mode, handpicking arms from a weapons arsenal we haven’t seen used before, and that we never should have seen in an environment that insists – and prides – on presenting itself as a union, both in name and in spirit. Now that they are being used, there no longer is such a union other than in name, in empty words.
This has turned into the kind of economic warfare one would expect to see between sworn and lethal enemies, that the US would gladly use against Russia for instance, but not between partners in a union founded on principles based entirely and exclusively on being mutually beneficial to everyone involved.
Those principles, and everything that has been based on them, the common currency, the surrender of ever more sovereignty on the part of the nations involved, the relinquishing of national powers to the various supra-national bodies in Brussels, has for everyone involved been based on trust. Nobody would ever have signed up to any of it without that trust. But just look where we are now.
When spokespeople at the troika side of the table stated on Thursday that they don’t know if Greek banks will be open on Monday, they crossed a line that should never even have been contemplated. This is so far beyond the pale, it should by all accounts, if everyone involved manages to keep a somewhat clear head, blow up the union once and for all. If a party to a negotiation that can’t get its way stoops to these kinds of tactics, there is very little room left for talk.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Affirming Flame
An Affirming Flame
According to an assortment of recent news stories, this Thursday, June 18, is the make-or-break date by which a compromise has to be reached between Greece and the EU if a Greek default, with the ensuing risk of a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone, is to be avoided. If that’s more than just media hype, there’s a tremendous historical irony in the fact. June 18 is after all the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, where a previous attempt at European political and economic integration came to grief.
Now of course there are plenty of differences between the two events. In 1815 the preferred instrument of integration was raw military force; in 2015, for a variety of reasons, a variety of less overt forms of political and economic pressure have taken the place of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The events of 1815 were also much further along the curve of defeat than those of 2015. Waterloo was the end of the road for France’s dream of pan-European empire, while the current struggles over the Greek debt are taking place at a noticeably earlier milepost along the same road. The faceless EU bureaucrats who are filling Napoleon’s role this time around thus won’t be on their way to Elba for some time yet.
“What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilization?” William Butler Yeats wrote that in 1936. It was a poignant question but also a highly relevant one, since the discords in question were moving rapidly toward explosion as he penned the last pages of A Vision, where those words appear.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Logic of Interventionism, or How to Wake up in a Prison
The Logic of Interventionism, or How to Wake up in a Prison
Archaic Financial Freedom
The mainstream press is still full of articles about the alleged evils of cash, which we regard as a typical “trial balloon” launched by the powers-that-be. The way this works is that they get a repressive measure they indent to implement out there, not only to propagandize in its favor, but also to gauge the reaction of the serfs. Is there an outcry? Does anyone care? If not, they quietly go forward with putting the measure into practice. If there is a great deal of pushback, they will simply wait for a better opportunity. A useful emergency always comes along after all. The Charlie Hebdo attack in France is a pertinent recent example: Under the false pretext that this is needed to “fight terrorism”, all cash transaction exceeding €1,000 have been banned in France.
German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has recently published an article about the “hoarding of cash” by citizens of Switzerland and the euro zone. With interest rates either at zero or negative, the cash currency component of the money supply has increased significantly, as more and more citizens prefer to hoard money under the proverbial mattress. The new European “bail-in” regime, so vividly demonstrated in Cyprus, is a major motive as well. Most recently, Greek citizens have resorted to withdrawing their deposits, with mainly small savers withdrawing cash (large depositors are more likely to simply transfer money to other parts of the euro area that seem safer).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Greek Parliamentary Debt Committee Declares All Debt Illegal
Greek Parliamentary Debt Committee Declares All Debt Illegal
For a while now, I’ve had a German saying floating around my files, that I didn’t really know what to do with. I know now. The saying is:
In der Not ist der Mittelweg der Tod.
Which loosely translates as:
In emergencies, the middle ground is lethal.
It seems like the Greek parliament thinks along just those lines. A preliminary report issued today declares all debt illegal. You can read the entire report behind the link. Here is chapter 8, Asessments of the Debt. I’d say this is somewhat inflammatory.
Hellenic Parliament’s Debt Truth Committee Preliminary Findings – Executive Summary of the report
Chapter 8, Assessment of the Debts as regards illegtimacy, odiousness, illegality, and unsustainability, provides an assessment of the Greek public debt according to the definitions regarding illegitimate, odious, illegal, and unsustainable debt adopted by the Committee.
Chapter 8 concludes that the Greek public debt as of June 2015 is unsustainable, since Greece is currently unable to service its debt without seriously impairing its capacity to fulfill its basic human rights obligations. Furthermore, for each creditor, the report provides evidence of indicative cases of illegal, illegitimate and odious debts.
• Debt to the IMF should be considered illegal since its concession breached the IMF’s own statutes, and its conditions breached the Greek Constitution, international customary law, and treaties to which Greece is a party. It is also illegitimate, since conditions included policy prescriptions that infringed human rights obligations. Finally, it is odious since the IMF knew that the imposed measures were undemocratic, ineffective, and would lead to serious violations of socio-economic rights.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Economic Depression In Greece Deepens As Tsipras Prepares To Deliver ‘The Great No’
The Economic Depression In Greece Deepens As Tsipras Prepares To Deliver ‘The Great No’
As Greece plunges even deeper into economic chaos, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says that his government is prepared to respond to the demands of the EU and the IMF with “the great no” and that his party will accept responsibility for whatever consequences follow. Despite years of intervention from the rest of Europe, Greece is a bigger economic mess today than ever. Greek GDP has shrunk by 26 percent since 2008, the national debt to GDP ratio in Greece is up to a staggering 175 percent, and the unemployment rate is up above 25 percent. Greek stocks are crashing and Greek bond yields are shooting into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the banking system is essentially on life support at this point. 400 million euros were pulled out of Greek banks on Monday alone. No matter what happens in the coming days, many believe that it is now only a matter of time before capital controls like we saw in Cyprus are imposed.
Over the past several months, there have been endless high level meetings over in Europe regarding this Greek crisis, but none of them have fixed anything. And even Jeroen Dijsselbloem admits that the odds of anything being accomplished during the meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Thursday is “very small”…
Some officials believe Thursday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers will be perhaps the last chance to stop Greece sliding into default and towards leaving the euro.
However the president of the so-called Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said the chance of an accord was “very small”.
And it is certainly not just Dijsselbloem that feels this way. At this point pretty much everyone is resigned to the fact that there is not going to be a deal any time soon. The following comes from Reuters…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bank Of Greece Pleads For Deal, Says “Uncontrollable Crisis”, “Soaring Inflation” Coming
Bank Of Greece Pleads For Deal, Says “Uncontrollable Crisis”, “Soaring Inflation” Coming
The situation in Greece has escalated meaningfully since last week. After the IMFeffectively threw in the towel and sent its negotiating team back to Washington on Thursday, EU and Greek officials agreed to meet in Brussels over the weekend in what was billed as a last ditch effort to end a long-running impasse and salvage some manner of deal in time to allow for the disbursement of at least part of the final tranche of aid ‘due’ to Greece under its second bailout program. Talks collapsed on Sunday however as Greek PM Alexis Tsipras, under pressure from the Left Platform, refused (again) to compromise on pension reform and the VAT, which are “red lines” for both the IMF and for Syriza party hardliners.
By Monday evening it was clear that both EU officials and Syriza’s radical left were drawing up plans for capital controls and a possible euro exit with Brussels looking to Thursday’s meeting of EU finance ministers in Luxembourg for a possible breakthrough. That seems unlikely however, given that Athens is sending FinMin Yanis Varoufakis whose last Eurogroup meeting ended with his being sidelined in negotiations after putting on a performance that led his counterparts to brand him an amateur, a gambler, and a time waster. For his part, Varoufakis says no new proposal will be tabled in Luxembourg as Eurogroup meetings aren’t the place for such discussions, which is ironic because Jean-Claude Juncker said something similar not long ago when the Greeks were trying to get a deal done at the very same Eurogroup meetings.
Perhaps realizing that pinning everyone’s hopes on a Thursday breakthrough is a fool’s errand, the EU will reportedly convene a high level, emergency meeting over what we’ve suggested may be a “Lehman Weekend” for the market.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is Telling Lies A Democratic Right?
Is Telling Lies A Democratic Right?
While I’m on the Greece topic again today, I can’t help but pointing out some of the changes in tone I’ve noticed in the press recently, shifting towards outright oftentimes vicious if not ridiculous antagonism vs Greece. Remember, there is an agenda, there are pre-cooked narratives galore, and these people are not your friends.
I won’t be able to cover all the things I would like to right now, let’s start with just the one. And I’m warning you: it might get philosophical.
This is from Marc Champion for Bloomberg yesterday:
Tsipras Isn’t on the Side of Democracy
Recently, I asked whether the Greek government actually wants to strike a deal on its debt, or if its increasingly erratic approach to negotiationsmight reflect a determination to ensure that Greeks blame their creditors, not their government, for a coming meltdown. [..] Here’s what Tsipras saidin a statement about the abortive talks and current bailout:
“One can only suspect political motives behind the fact that the institutions insist on further pension cuts, despite five years of pillaging via the memoranda. The Greek government has been negotiating with a specific plan and documented proposals. We will wait patiently till the institutions adhere to realism.
Those who consider our sincere wish for a solution as well as our efforts to bridge the gap as a sign of weakness, should have in mind the following: We are not only carrying a historical past underlined with struggles. We are carrying our people’s dignity as well as the aspirations of all Europeans. We cannot ignore this responsibility. It is not a matter of ideological stubbornness. It has to do with democracy.”
Tsipras’s proposition that he’s championing the hope of downtrodden masses across Europe is nonsense. Germans may be wrong and unfair to prefer losing the loans they made Greece to taking a haircut, but they have a democratic right to believe they’re correct.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Next Great European Financial Crisis Has Begun
The Next Great European Financial Crisis Has Begun
The Greek financial system is in the process of totally imploding, and the rest of Europe will soon follow. Neither the Greeks nor the Germans are willing to give in, and that means that there is very little chance that a debt deal is going to happen by the end of June. So that means that we will likely see a major Greek debt default and potentially even a Greek exit from the eurozone. At this point, credit default swaps on Greek debt have risen 456 percent in price since the beginning of this year, and the market has priced in a 75 percent chance that a Greek debt default will happen. Over the past month, the yield on two year Greek bonds has skyrocketed from 20 percent to more than 30 percent, and the Greek stock market has fallen by a total of 13 percent during the last three trading days alone. This is what a financial collapse looks like, and if Greece does leave the euro, we are going to see this kind of carnage happen all over Europe.
Officials over in Europe are now openly speaking of the need to prepare for a “state of emergency” now that negotiations have totally collapsed. At one time, it would have been unthinkable for Greece to leave the euro, but now it appears that this is precisely what will happen unless a miracle happens…
Greece is heading for a state of emergency and an exit from the euro following the collapse of talks to agree a bailout deal, senior EU officials warned last night.
Europe must be prepared to step in otherwise Greek society would face an unprecedented crisis with power blackouts, medicine shortages and no money to pay for police, they said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What’s Next in the Greek Farce and Why
What’s Next in the Greek Farce and Why
The Man They Hate with a Passion
Euro area politicians and IMF bureaucrats really hate Yanis Varoufakis’ guts with a passion. The media are full with denunciations of the man as “unprofessional”, negotiators of the euro-group let it be known (anonymously, natch) that “it got to the point where eyes roll”, that they were “sick and tired of being lectured about austerity and the effects of the crisis”, in short, it was “impossible to do business with him”.
Why do they hate him so much? Allegedly ,“any sympathy for Greece was eroded by his failure to draft concrete proposals.” Typical Mediterranean lazy bum is the message, in other words. Big on vacuous emoting, but doesn’t want to waste time on doing his homework (plus, he wears no tie…you have to be clad in the technocratic uniform if you want to be taken seriously).
The eurocrats really hate this one. They’re probably all trying to channel Tony G when they meet Varoufakis.
Photo credit: Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters
Forgive us if our BS meter starts twitching when they are quoting unnamed officials with such pronouncements all over the mainstream press and are hammering the message home with unwavering regularity on Europe’s state-controlled TV stations. The reality is probably this: they hate him because he isn’t one of them.
Varoufakis is no politician, and apparently has no intentions of becoming one. His economic views may be a bit blue-eyed given his alliance with a bunch of lefties, but where and when has he said anything about the Greek situation that was not substantially correct?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Starvation Is The Price Greeks Will Pay For Remaining In The EU
Starvation Is The Price Greeks Will Pay For Remaining In The EU
Syriza, the new Greek government that intended to rescue Greece from austerity, has come a cropper. The government relied on the good will of its EU “partners,” only to find that its “partners” had no good will. The Greek government did not understand that the only concern was the bottom line, or profits, of those who held the Greek debt.
The Greek people are as out to lunch as their government. The majority of Greeks want to remain in the EU even though it means that their pensions, their wages, their social services, and their employment opportunities will be reduced. Apparently for Greeks, being a part of Europe is worth being driven into the ground.
The alleged “Greek crisis” makes no sense whatsoever. It is obvious that Greece cannot with its devastated economy repay the debts that Goldman Sachs hid and then capitalized on the inside information, helping to cause the crisis. If the solvency of the holders of the Greek debt, apparently the NY hedge funds and German and Dutch banks, depends on being repaid, the European Central Bank could just follow the example of the Federal Reserve and print the money to secure the Greek debt. The ECB is already printing 60 billion euros a month to save the European financial system, so why not include Greece?
A conservative might say that such a course of action would cause inflation, but it hasn’t. The Fed has been creating money hands over fists for seven years, and according to the government there is no inflation. We even have negative interest rates attesting to the absence of inflation. Why will creating money for Greece create inflation but not for Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and JPMorganChase?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Europe Warns Of “State Of Emergency” As Greek Stalemate Drags On
Europe Warns Of “State Of Emergency” As Greek Stalemate Drags On
Talks between Greece and creditors collapsed on Sunday after Athens once again refused to compromise on a the pension cuts and VAT hike the troika insists are necessary if the country is to receive the final tranche of aid from its second bailout program.
We noted yesterday that the charade is hardly over as Greek PM Alexis Tsipras knows he can continue to bluff for a few more weeks. Even in the event Greece misses its June 30 payment to the IMF, Christine Lagarde would need to muster the political will to send a failure to pay notice to the IMF board, at which point Athens would be formally in default and cross acceleration rights for the country’s other creditors would trigger. But Lagarde has considerable discretion on the default notice and can delay it for at least 30 days. Between this and the fact that a critical payment to the ECB is still more than a month away, we suggested that the brinksmanship was far from over and that the new ‘deadline’ would be Thursday’s meeting of EU finance ministers in Luxembourg.
On Monday the usual back-and-forth between the IMF, Greece, and EU officials continued with IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard insisting that Greece must implement changes to pensions and the VAT in order to hit (reduced) budget surplus targets while EU creditors should reshuffle Greece’s payment schedule, reduce interest rates on the country’s debt, and, if push comes to shove, writedown Greek bonds:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Snowden, Putin, Greece: It’s All The Same Story
Snowden, Putin, Greece: It’s All The Same Story
Through the last decades, as we have been getting ever more occupied trying to be what society tells us is defined as successful, we all missed out on a lot of changes in our world. Or perhaps we should be gentle to ourselves and say we’re simply slow to catch up.
Which is somewhat curious since we’ve also been getting bombarded with fast increasing amounts of what we’re told is information, so you’d think it might have become easier to keep up. It was not.
While we were busy being busy we for instance were largely oblivious to the fact the US is no longer a beneficial force in the world, and that it doesn’t spread democracy or freedom. Now you may argue to what extent that has ever been true, and you should, but the perception was arguably much closer to the truth 70 years ago, at the end of WWII, then it is today.
Another change we really can’t get our heads around is how the media have turned from a source of information to a source of – pre-fabricated – narratives. We’ll all say to some extent or another that we know our press feeds us propaganda, but, again arguably, few of us are capable of pinpointing to what extent that is true. Perhaps no big surprise given the overdose of what passes for information, but duly noted.
So far so good, you’re not as smart as you think. Bummer. But still an easy one to deny in the private space of your own head. If you get undressed and stand in front of the mirror, though, maybe not as easy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
