Greece vs Europe: who will blink first?
“The eurozone stands on the brink of another crisis as Athens confronts Brussels and Berlin” - By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph (London)
Summary Below by Anthony O'Brien
There is a whiff of 1914 to the latest Balkan showdown. Everybody thinks everybody else is bluffing, all of them betting that a calamitous chain reaction will be averted.
In Germany, Der Spiegel reports that Angela Merkel thinks Greece can be ejected safely from the euro, if the rebel Syriza party wins the elections on January 25 and carries out its pledge to tear up Greece’s hated “memorandum” with the EU-IMF.
As a result of this crisis, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, is caught in a horrible bind.
He is itching to kick off a trillion-euro blast of quantitative easing on January 22. To make any difference, however, this must entail the purchase of sovereign debt. Yet Mr Draghi can hardly agree to buy Greek bonds three days before the likely election of a party that has vowed to repudiate that same debt.
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