Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Google News is once again filled with Greece on the Brink headlines and the Telegraph has started a live update page for the Greek debt crisis. Today’s Eurogroup meeting ended without any deal, Merkel says she won’t budge, and Greece admits they have no money to make their bundled payment to the IMF at the end of the month.
And the IMF has said there will be no grace period if Greece misses their June 30 deadline.
Also, tomorrow Greece owes €85 million to the European Central Bank. Since the ECB backstop is the only reason Greek banks aren’t already insolvent, I suspect Greece will find some way to make that payment, even if it means raiding the Emergency Transplants for Crippled Orphans fund.
Other than that, things are going swimmingly.
The sticking point, as always, is Greece’s insistence that the rest of Europe lend it more so as to allow Greece to continue spending insanely more money than it actually has on its bloated welfare state, and that it absolutely will not cut government pensions (the pensions it will be unable to pay without a loan anyway) at all. But “Greece still spends more than any other country in the European Union on pensions as a proportion to GDP – with the country shelling out a whopping 17.5 percent.”
British tourists are warned to take cash if they’re vacationing in Greece, since cash machines and credit cards may not work due to capital controls.
How much is Greece uncertainty weighing down stocks?
Today's Greek headline in context pic.twitter.com/8PnQbz8e21
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 18, 2015
Eh, not so much…
Tags: Angela Merkel, Budget, European Central Bank, European Debt Crisis, Foreign Policy, Greece, Welfare State