Events in the past 48 hours have reinforced my long-held view that a copout – whereby the Troika grants the Greek government new loans in exchange for agreeing to strict reforms – is more likely than a full bailout (including significant debt forgiveness) or burnout (Greece defaults and leaves the eurozone). See Greece Lightening (28 January 2015) and Half-Time: Pass the smelling salts (3 July 2015). Read more
I commented on Twitter on Saturday morning that the “Greek crisis is as much about personalities as it is about cash: Tsipras, Varoufakis, Draghi, Dijsselbloem, Lagarde, Merkel, Tusk, Juncker, Putin, Obama”. My view was reinforced by former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ argument in a Financial Times article posted Saturday afternoon that “Greece is no longer about numbers. It is about the high politics of Europe”[1]. Read more
It has been two arduous months since the Syriza party won the Greek elections on a platform to renegotiate the country’s debt and terminate austerity measures imposed by the IMF/ECB/European Commission Troika. The negotiations between Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis and his eurozone counterparts have generated much noise but seemingly achieved little. Read more
The relationship between the newly elected Syriza-led government and Greece’s official creditors has certainly not been black and white. However, I still think they will eschew the more extreme scenarios, as I argued in Greece Lightening and depict in Figure 1, and this will be one of a number of mildly supportive factors for EUR/USD. Read more
The ink has barely dried on the ECB’s shock-and-awe QE program that the market’s attention has already shifted back to Greece. The election over the weekend of a new government, led by Prime Minister Tsipras, has reignited the seemingly annual debate about whether/when Greece will default on its debt and leave the eurozone. Read more