Wednesday, May 6, 2015

6/5/15: Crunch Time in Greece: Day -t or -t-1


Just as Greece barely made today's payment of EUR200 million to the IMF (there's much more coming up - http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/04/24415-greek-debt-maturities-through-2016.html) even if only by not paying its own internal bills (http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/greek-debt-crisis-update-2087392-May2015/), the ECB continued to pretend that all is fine in the solvent world of Greek banks. As there exult, the ECB hiked Greek ELA by another EUR2 billion to EUR78.9 billion, which means that some 60% of Greek deposits are now covered out of ELA.

Per FT report (http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/319051/ecb-mulls-tougher-greek-lending-rules), the ECB's governing council discussed whether "to impose tougher haircuts on the collateral Greek lenders are using to secure emergency loans from Greece's central bank. The council …voted against raising the haircuts, but is likely to revisit the issue should Monday's Eurogroup meeting of eurozone finance ministers disappoint." Which means that should the Greeks continue to play hard ball with the Eurogroup, the ECB can raise collateral requirements on ELA and force Greek banks into panic search for new collateral eligible to be pawned into the ELA.

And while the Greek savers continue to hold deposits in Greek banks - yes, clear evidence of infinite irrationality of retail investors - currency dealers are cutting credit lines extended to Greek banks for trading in forex markets (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-06/greece-s-banks-said-to-face-curbs-to-foreign-exchange-trading-i9d1an9v). That's because the Eurosystem et al can fool some of the people some of the time (depositors for now) but can't fool all of the people all of the time.

The whole shift in markets sentiment is not missing on the Credit Default Swaps traders either:



Meanwhile, do recall that Greece is at a risk of running primary deficit in place of primary surplus for 2015: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/05/5515-imf-greece-europe-more-bickering.html (although this FT piece seems to suggest they are not, yet… http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/2015/05/06/is-this-how-greece-is-avoiding-bankruptcy/) and you have a potent cocktail of explosives wired together and the clock's ticking... EUR200 million 'Tick'… EUR800 million 'Tock'… before June EUR1.5 billion 'Kaboom!'

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