From € to 0?

Protests in Thessaloniki, Greece, May 2011, portokalis 

From London Review of Books:

The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order: at barely 3 per cent of Eurozone GDP, the Greek economy could vanish without trace and scarcely be missed by anyone else. The dangers posed by the imminent Greek default are all to do with how it happens.

I speak of the Greek default as a sure thing because it is: the markets are pricing Greek government debt as if it has already defaulted. This in itself is a huge deal, because the euro was built on the assumption that no country in it would ever default, and as a result there is no precedent and, more important still, no mechanism for what is about to happen. The prospective default could come in any one of several different flavours. From everybody’s perspective, the best of them would be what is known as a ‘voluntary rollover’. In that scenario, the institutions that are owed money by the Greek government will swallow heavily and, when their loan is due to be repaid, will permit their borrowings to be rolled over into another long loan. There is a gun-to-the-side-of-the-head aspect to this ‘voluntary’ deal, since the relevant institutions are under enormous governmental pressure to comply and are also faced with the fact that if they say no, they will have triggered a proper default, which means their loans will plummet in value and they’ll end up worse off. The deal on offer is: lend us more money, or lose most of the money you’ve already lent.

This is, at the moment, the best-case scenario and the current plan A. It reflects the failure of the original plan A, which involved lending the government of George Papandreou €110 billion in May last year in return for a promise to cut government spending and increase tax revenue, both by unprecedented amounts. The joint European Central Bank-EU-IMF loan was necessary because, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Greece was exposed as having an economy based on phoney data and cheap credit. The cheap credit had now dried up, and Greece was faced by the simplest and worst economic predicament of any government: it couldn’t pay its debts.

There is a good moment in one of the otherwise terrible Star Trek movies, in which Spock quotes an ancient Vulcan proverb: ‘Only Nixon could go to China.’ Similarly, it is probably true that only George Papandreou could confront the fundamental economic structure of the modern Greek state, since his father Andreas did more than anyone else to build it.

…

If Greece said it was going to leave the euro, every single adult in the country would run, walk or crawl to the nearest bank and withdraw all their money – that’s because if they leave their euros put, the euros turn into drachmas which are worth, say, half as much. The mass withdrawal would make every bank in Greece go broke the same day. So the government would have to declare a ‘bank holiday’, i.e. a total freeze on all bank accounts, as the first step towards starting a new currency. But what would happen to all those overseas debts, still denominated in euros? They would immediately be twice as expensive now that they would have to be repaid in devalued drachmas. So maybe the government would have no choice but to declare all its debts void.

“Once Greece goes…”, John Lanchester, London Review of Books