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Grexit “Disaster” Looms As Greek Hospitals Run Out Of Sheets, Painkillers
Grexit “Disaster” Looms As Greek Hospitals Run Out Of Sheets, Painkillers
The default countdown is about to go under 10 days and it is becoming increasingly apparent that both Greece and its creditors have had enough.
Months of tense negotiations have gone nowhere and yielded exactly nothing and it now looks like PM Alexis Tsipras and FinMin Yanis Varoufakis may be willing to miss a June 5 payment to the IMF if it means proving they are serious about keeping their campaign promises and forcing the troika to the bargaining table. The implications of a missed payment aren’t entirely clear but Athens is keen to predict the worst as it tries to squeeze concessions from creditors.Bloomberg has more:
A day after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greek society can’t absorb any more austerity measures, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said his government has met the euro area and IMF three-quarters of the way, and that it’s up to creditors to cover the remainder.“Greece has made enormous strides reaching a deal, it is now up to the institutions to do their bit,” Varoufakis said Sunday on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. “It is not in their interests as our creditors that the cow that produces the milk should be beaten into submission to the extent that the milk will not be enough for them to get their money back”…
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, meanwhile, signaled there isn’t much wiggle room after Tsipras’s government committed to policy changes in return for aid in a euro-area accord on Feb. 20.
“That is the condition for completing the current program,” Schaeuble said in a Deutschlandfunk radio interview aired Sunday. “The problems are rooted in Greece. And now Greece does have to fulfill its commitments.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The IMF Leaks Greece
The IMF Leaks Greece
Whenever secret or confidential information or documents are leaked to the press, the first question should always be who leaked it and why. That’s often more important than the contents of what has been leaked. And since there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about a leaked document the past two days, here’s a closer look. Spoiler alert: the document(s) don’t reveal much of anything new, despite the hullabaloo.
On Saturday, Paul Mason at Channel 4 in Britain posted an IMF document(s) that according to him says, among other things, that the IMF expects a June 5 Grexit – in one form or another – if there is no agreement before that date between Athens and its creditors, ‘the institutions’ (of which the IMF itself is one).
The leaking is simply what it is as long as we don’t know the how and why. But the question will remain why somebody takes the risk to leak something only a small and select group of people are privy to. Is it leaked because it’s politically important, does Paul Mason pay a lot of money for leaks? Or is it perhaps an intentional leak, in this case ordered by IMF higher-ups? And if so, for what reason? A veiled threat?
Fact is that when you look through the documents Mason published, you notice that he adds his own interpretation to them. Mason, to whom documents seem to be leaked on a regular basis – he wrote about 2 more leaked documents 3 months ago – for instance suggests quite strongly in his write up at Channel 4 that June 5th is the date for a possible default.
However, the documents don’t mention that date. They only talk about June, not June 5. Mason writes about IMF ‘staff’: “They point to the €1.5 billion due to the IMF in June as the first vulnerable payment.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
When Europe Gets Greece’s Jingle Mail: Dealing with Default
When Europe Gets Greece’s Jingle Mail: Dealing with Default
The costs and consequences of Greece exiting the Eurozone may well dwarf the financial losses triggered by Greece’s default.
The term Jingle mail originated in the great popping of the housing bubble 2008-2011. It refers to defaulting homeowners mailing the keys to their house back to the lender, and it denotes the finality of default: it’s over.
The dream of ownership and easy wealth leveraged by vast debt: over. The dream that loans to marginal borrowers were as good as loans issued to qualified buyers: over.
And most importantly, the lender’s dream that marginal borrowers could somehow make the payments if the terms were tweaked is also over.
Which brings us to the jingle mailGreece is about to send Europe.Greece is analogous to the marginal home buyer who took on way more debt than the household could afford. Europe is analogous to the lender, who faces a spectrum of unsavory options:
1. Accept the reality of default, write off the loans and accept the horrendous losses.
2. Play for time by renegotiating the loan, reducing the payments, stretching the payments over a longer period, etc.
3. Bury the non-performing loan aszombie debt: the loan disappears from the performing loans but isn’t listed as a non-performing loan, either. It has become a zombie loan, neither performing nor non-performing.
Both of the latter strategies are versions of kicking the can down the road: what the lender does not want to do is report the loss and deal with the consequences (such as insolvency, lawsuits, etc.)
So the lender strings the debtor along, squeezing enough interest out to justify the claim that the loan is performing and the asset (i.e. the loan) is still worth its listed value.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
IMF Preparing Greek Default Contingency Plan
IMF Preparing Greek Default Contingency Plan
The biggest slow motion trainwreck in history, one that everyone knows how it ends just not when (especially since the “when” is about 5 years overdue), that of the Greek sovereign default may just got a bit more exciting earlier today when the WSJ reported that the IMF can no longer lie – like Mario Draghi did to Zero Hedge in 2013 – that there are preparation for a Plan B. To wit: “the International Monetary Fund is working with national authorities in southeastern Europe on contingency plans for a Greek default, a senior fund official said—a rare public admission that regulators are preparing for the potential failure to agree on continued aid for Athens.”
According to the WSJ, the IMF is focusing on nations neighboring Greece, asking their national banking supervisors to “ensure that subsidiaries of Greek banks have enough assets that they can exchange for emergency financing at their own central banks—in case financing from their parent institutions is suddenly cut off—and that deposit-insurance funds are at sufficient levels, Mr. Decressin said.”
In other words, have a Greek default Plan B ready, preferably right now.
“We are in a dialogue with all of these countries,” said Jörg Decressin, deputy director of the IMF’s Europe department. “We are talking with them about the contingency plans they have, what measures they can take.”Greek banks are big players in some of its neighbors’ financial systems. In Bulgaria, subsidiaries of National Bank of Greece SA, Alpha Bank SA, Piraeus Bank SA and Eurobank Ergasias SA own around 22% of banking assets, roughly the same as Greek banks own in Macedonia. Greek banks are also active in Romania, Albania and Serbia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Germany Prepares For “Plan B”, Says Greece Would “Need Not Only A Third Bailout, But Fourth, Fifth Or Even More”
Germany Prepares For “Plan B”, Says Greece Would “Need Not Only A Third Bailout, But Fourth, Fifth Or Even More”
It has been a very disturbing 24 hours for Greece.
It all started during yesterday’s surprisingly short, just one hour long Eurozone finmin meeting in Riga, where Yanis Varoufakis not only got the most “hostile” reception yet being called “a time-waster, gambler, and amateur“, but for the first time one minister openly said that maybe it was time governments prepared for the plan B of a Greek default. This happened after Jeroen Dijsselbloem slammed the door on Varoufakis’ proposal for early cash after partial reforms.
“A comprehensive and detailed list of reforms is needed,” Dijsselbloem told a news conference following a meeting in Riga. “A comprehensive deal is necessary before any disbursement can take place … We are all aware that time is running out.”
And so, what was once anathema, namely the official hints that a Grexit is being contemplated at the highest ranks, has now become almost commonplace, courtesy of the backstop provided by the ECB’s QE, which has lulled everyone into a sense of calm because somehow the hope has been kindled that the ECB (which is rapidly running out of government bonds to buy) can offset the realization that what was once an “unbreakable union” is suddenly not only breakable, but no longer a union. As such the trillions in deposit outflows that will sweep the periphery are somehow to be ignored because, well, “Draghi.”
This continued earlier today, when none other than German Finance Minister Schaeuble hintedthat Berlin was preparing for a possible Greek default, drawing a parallel with the secrecy of German reunification plans in 1989.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Grexit: Remaining In The Eurozone Is No Longer ‘The Base Case’ For Greece
Grexit: Remaining In The Eurozone Is No Longer ‘The Base Case’ For Greece
According to the Wall Street Journal, Greece staying in the eurozone is no longer “the base case” for European officials, and one even told the Journal that “literally nothing has been achieved” in negotiations with the new Greek government since the Greek election almost three months ago. In other words, you can take all of that stuff you heard about how the Greek crisis was fixed and throw it out the window. Over the next few months, a big chunk of Greek government bonds held by the IMF and the European Central Bank will mature. Unless negotiations produce a load of new cash for Greece, there will be a default, and right now there is very little optimism that we will see an agreement any time soon. In fact, as I wrote aboutthe other day, behind the scenes banks all over Europe are quietly preparing for a Grexit. European news sources are reporting that the Greek banking system is on the verge of collapse, and over the past couple of weeks Greek bond yields have shot through the roof. Most of the things that we would expect to see in the lead up to a Greek exit from the eurozone are happening, and now we will wait and see if the Greeks actually have the guts to pull the trigger when push comes to shove.
At this point, many top European officials are quietly admitting that it is more likely than not that Greece will leave the euro by the end of this year. The following is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article that I mentioned above…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Global Liquidity Squeeze Has Begun
The Global Liquidity Squeeze Has Begun
Get ready for another major worldwide credit crunch. Today, the entire global financial system resembles a colossal spiral of debt. Just about all economic activity involves the flow of credit in some way, and so the only way to have “economic growth” is to introduce even more debt into the system. When the system started to fail back in 2008, global authorities responded by pumping this debt spiral back up and getting it to spin even faster than ever. If you can believe it, the total amount of global debt has risen by $35 trillion since the last crisis. Unfortunately, any system based on debt is going to break down eventually, and there are signs that it is starting to happen once again. For example, just a few days ago the IMF warned regulators to prepare for a global “liquidity shock“. And on Friday, Chinese authorities announced a ban on certain types of financing for margin trades on over-the-counter stocks, and we learned that preparations are being made behind the scenes in Europe for a Greek debt default and a Greek exit from the eurozone. On top of everything else, we just witnessed the biggest spike in credit application rejections ever recorded in the United States. All of these are signs that credit conditions are tightening, and once a “liquidity squeeze” begins, it can create a lot of fear.
Over the past six months, the Chinese stock market has exploded upward even as the overall Chinese economy has started to slow down. Investors have been using something called “umbrella trusts” to finance a lot of these stock purchases, and these umbrella trusts have given them the ability to have much more leverage than normal brokerage financing would allow. This works great as long as stocks go up. Once they start going down, the losses can be absolutely staggering.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is May 9 The Grexit Date?
Is May 9 The Grexit Date?
Yes, more Greece, ever more Greece. Well, the focus is still very much there. It’s not the only topic, obviously, China warrants interest too, certainly with things like Tyler Durden quoting Cornerstone Macro as saying China’s true economic growth rate was just 1.6% in Q1 2015, not the official government number of 7%. Never trust anyone, especially a government, that consistently meets or beats its predictions. With housing prices falling the way they have, -6% or thereabouts, and over 70% of Chinese private investment in real estate, it’s hard to see how a 7% GDP growth number could pass scrutiny. Sure, there’s the stock market bubble, but even then.
But for now back to Athens. Or Washington, actually, where Yanis Varoufakis finds himself. From what we can gather on his schedule, Varoufakis has (or has had) meetings with Obama and Lagarde on Thursday, and with Mario Draghi, Jack Lew and Wolfgang Schaeuble on Friday.
Also on Friday, he’s meeting sovereign debt lawyer Lee Buchheit, who’s a partner at New York law firm Cleary Gottlieb [..Steen & Hamilton], and has helped restructure debt for various countries. The Guardian, back in 2013 (how times have changed!), portrayed Buchheit as the ‘fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress’:
This is the man who stands up to the vulture funds – so named because they buy up the debt of desperately poor countries in order to chase them through the courts for repayment. So it is something of a surprise to meet a slight, mild-mannered lawyer, with more than a whiff of academia about him.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Greece Said To Prepare “Grexit”, Drachma, Bank Nationalization Plans
Greece Said To Prepare “Grexit”, Drachma, Bank Nationalization Plans
On Thursday morning, we took an in-depth look at what the progression of events is likely to be in the event a cash-strapped, negotiation-weary Greece finally, for lack of will or for lack of options, fails to scrape together enough cash to pay its creditors. As BofAML notes, a missed IMF payment and/or failure to make interest payments to either the ECB or private creditors over the coming weeks would likely lead to default within 30 days, at which point “mark-to-fantasy” becomes mark-to-market and then “mark-to-default” in very short order.
Although Greek officials came out midday with a “categorical” denial of reports that the country was set to run completely out of cash in just 7 days, it now appears Athens may be prepared to chance a missed IMF payment and all that comes with it if it means saving face and preserving Syriza’s campaign promises to the beleaguered Greek populace.
More, via The Telegraph:
Greece is drawing up drastic plans to nationalise the country’s banking system and introduce a parallel currency to pay bills unless the eurozone takes steps to defuse the simmering crisis and soften its demands.
Sources close to the ruling Syriza party said the government is determined to keep public services running and pay pensions as funds run critically low. It may be forced to take the unprecedented step of missing a payment to the International Monetary Fund next week.
Greece no longer has enough money to pay the IMF €458m on April 9 and also to cover payments for salaries and social security on April 14, unless the eurozone agrees to disburse the next tranche of its interim bail-out deal in time.
“We are a Left-wing government. If we have to choose between a default to the IMF or a default to our own people, it is a no-brainer,” said a senior official…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is Greece About to Play its Geopolitical Trump Card and Ignite a Chain Reaction Across Europe?
Is Greece About to Play its Geopolitical Trump Card and Ignite a Chain Reaction Across Europe?
If the EMU powers persist mechanically with their stale demands – even reverting to terms that the previous pro-EMU government in Athens rejected in December – they risk setting off a political chain-reaction that can only eviscerate the EU Project as a motivating ideology in Europe.
Forced Grexit would entrench a pervasive suspicion that EU bodies are ultimately agents of creditor enforcement. It would expose the Project’s post-war creed of solidarity as so much humbug.
Greece could not plausibly remain in Nato if ejected from EMU in acrimonious circumstances. It would drift into the Russian orbit, where Hungary’s Viktor Orban already lies. The southeastern flank of Europe’s security system would fall apart.
Mr Tsipras is now playing the Russian card with an icy ruthlessness, more or less threatening to veto fresh EU measures against the Kremlin as the old set expires. “We disagree with sanctions. The new European security architecture must include Russia,” he told the TASS news agency.
He offered to turn Greece into a strategic bridge, linking the two Orthodox nations. “Russian-Greek relations have very deep roots in history,” he said, hitting all the right notes before his trip to Moscow next week.
– From Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph: Greek Defiance Mounts as Alexis Tsipras Turns to Russia and China.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve at times been a strong critic of Greek leadership’s seeming unwillingness to demonstrate the courage necessary to flip the bird to EU bureaucrats and usher in paradigm level change for the long suffering nation. At the core of the problem seems the be the mandate under which Syriza was elected — namely to end austerity, but remain in the euro.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Greece Prepares To Leave
Greece Prepares To Leave
Speculation and expert comments are thrown around once more – or still – like candy on Halloween. Let me therefore retrace what I’ve said before. Because I think it’s really awfully simple, once you got the underlying factors in place.
But first, if one thing has become obvious after Syriza was elected to form a Greek government on January 25, it’s that the party is not ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’. Those monikers can now be swept off all editorial desks across the world, and whoever keeps using them risks looking like an awful fool.
All Syriza has done to date, when you look from an objective point of view, is to throw out feelers, trying to figure out what the rest of the eurozone would do. And to make sure that whatever responses it got are well documented.
Because of course Greece (through Syriza) is preparing to leave the eurozone. Of course the effects and consequences of such a step are being discussed, non-stop. They would be fools if they didn’t have these discussions. And of course there will be a referendum at some point.
There’s just that one big caveat: Syriza insists on needing a mandate from its voters for everything it does, whether that may be kowtowing to Greece’s EU overlords or walking away from them. At present, however, it doesn’t have a mandate for either of these actions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
EU and Greece Running Out of Time – As Bank Runs Intensify, Bail-Ins Likely
EU and Greece Running Out of Time – As Bank Runs Intensify, Bail-Ins Likely
– EU and Greece running out of time as talks end “in disarray” – again
– Greece warns Merkel of ‘impossible’ debt
– Concerns Greece out of money by end of April
– Friday’s “agreement” in Brussels falls apart hours later as protagonists fail to agree on specifics
– Greece now insolvent – will run out of liquidity by end of April
– Greek banks on verge of collapse as runs continue – €1.5 billion emptied out of banks last week alone
– ‘Grexit’ could propel gold to over $2,000/oz
– Cyprus style bail-ins look increasingly possible
Greece’s place in the Eurozone is as precarious as ever as talks between Prime Minister Tsipras and European leaders in Brussels broke down – hours after reaching general agreement – and Greece warned Germany that it will be “impossible” for Greece to service debt payments due in the coming weeks if the EU fails to provide short-term financial assistance.
Greece – faced with illiquidity, insolvency and a potential banking collapse – is running out of time and appears to be on the back foot as its international creditors refuse to countenance any debt restructuring, rescheduling or forgiveness.
The warning from Greece came in a letter from Tsipras to Angele Merkel provided to the Financial Times. It comes as concerns mount that Athens will struggle to make pension and wage payments by as early as next week, the end of March, and could run out of cash completely before the end of April.
The letter, dated March 15, came just before Ms Merkel agreed to meet Mr Tsipras on the sidelines of an EU summit last Thursday and invited him for a one-on-one session in Berlin, scheduled for Monday evening.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
C’mon Angela, Let Them Greexit
C’mon Angela, Let Them Greexit
With each passing day it becomes more obvious that Europe is heading for an epochal financial conflagration. So buy-the-dip if you must, but don’t believe for a minute that the US has decoupled. When the euro and EU eventually implode it will rattle the bones of every gambler and algo left in the casinos anywhere on the planet.
Yes, the school yard name calling and roughhousing now going on in Europe makes it appear that behind the sturm und drang there is some negotiations happening. But the truth is there is nothing to negotiate. Greece is so completely and terminally bankrupt that there is no solution other than default and greexit.
To insist that Greece service the entirely of its staggering $350 billion of debt, as does Germany and the troika apparatchiks, is to advocate the extinguishment of democracy in Greece and its reduction to a colonial mandate of Brussels; and in the process, to eliminate any semblance of economic life among the debt serfs who would inhabit it.
Its just math. Sooner or later interest rates must normalize. For a country with Greece’s profligate fiscal history, there is no possibility that the interest carry cost on a public debt load equal to 175% of GDP could be any less than 6-7% in the absence of EU guarantees.That means that the Greek state’s annual interest bill would approach 10% of GDP before paying down a single dime of principal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
After Pillaging Pensions, Greece Raids Utilities To Repay Troika; Bonds Plunge As Bank Run Accelerates
After Pillaging Pensions, Greece Raids Utilities To Repay Troika; Bonds Plunge As Bank Run Accelerates
Following yesterday’s news that the ECB is now running simulationson what a Grexit would mean for Greek bond prices (spoiler alert:
“fundamentals” suggest a 95% loss), overnight we got more confirmation that Mario Draghi continues to tighten the screws on the Greek sovereign corpse, when Bloomberg reported that the ECB once again raised the maximum amount of emergency liquidity available to Greek lenders by €400 million, but less than the Greek central bank requested, people familiar with the decision said.
The increase was approved by the ECB’s Governing Council on Wednesday, the people said, asking not to be identified as the council meeting was private. Greece requested about 900 million euros, one of the people said. The increase should take ELA to about 70 billion euros. Policy makers raised the limit by 600 million euros on March 12, after a boost by 500 million euros to 68.8 billion euros on March 5. Greek banks haven’t used all their ELA and have a total of about 3 billion euros in liquidity available, one of the people said.
However, not a single penny from this additional emergency “liquidity” would enter the economy, as all of it was merely provided to offset the ever faster Greek bank run because as Reuters reported, on Wednesday Greek banks saw deposit outflows of €300 million,the highest in a single day since a February deal with the euro zone that staved off a banking collapse, two senior Greek bankers familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Austrian Black Swan Claims Its First Foreign Casualty: German Duesselhyp Collapses, To Be Bailed Out
The Austrian Black Swan Claims Its First Foreign Casualty: German Duesselhyp Collapses, To Be Bailed Out
Precisely one week ago in “A Black Swan Lands In Southern Austria: The Ripple Effects Of “Mini-Greece Going Off In The Heartland Of Europe“, when analyzing the consequences of the collapse of Austria’s bad bank, we noted perhaps the biggest paradox of Europe’s emergency preparedness response to the Greek collapse and imminent expulsion from the Eurozone: namely that the biggest threat to German banks was no longer in some Mediterranean nation, but in its very own back yard. To wit:
Irony #2, and the biggest one of all: while German banks had spent the past 3 years preparing for the inevitable Grexit and offloading all their exposure to the now insolvent Greek state, it was a waterfall chain of events which started in Germany’s own “back yard”, courtesy of auditors who decided it was unnecessary to mark losses to market until it was far too late, and the immediate outcome is that one ninth of until recently Aaa/AAA-rated Austria is now also insolvent. And that is just the beginning.One can only imagine how many such other “0% risk-weighted” Pandora boxes lie in wait across what are otherwise considered Europe’s safest banks, provinces and nations.
Indeed, it was just the beginning, and moments ago we got confirmation that the next domino has tipped over, following a Reuters report that Germany’s deposit protection fund will take over the property lender Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank AG (DuesselHyp), which has “run into problems” due to its exposure to Austrian lender Hypo Alpe Adria’s “bad bank” Heta.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
