Yves Smith July 15, 2015 at 6:02 am 1. It took ten years of planning and three years of execution for the euro launch to go smoothly.
2. Badly planned and executed IT projects cannot be fixed. They generally have to be terminated. The failure rate of large IT projects is over 50%. 3. The performance standards for payments systems are extremely high. This is mission critical levels of accuracy and uptime. If you get it wrong, you are out of business very quickly. And from a national perspective, payments systems that are not up to scratch are not permitted to connect to the international “grid”. The Vatican is a noteworthy example. 4. As we have explained at considerable length in earlier posts, getting the drachma working from an IT standpoint does not just involve Greece doing its part, which is considerable, but lots of other independent parties doing their part, such as participants in the fragmented credit/debit card business. 5. Tell me how Greece survives if it has to carry on as it does now, with effectively no payments system. Importers can’t pay for imports unless they truck cash to the border, dump it into foreign banks, and then wire it to importers, or alternatively, bring it to the premises of their foreign suppliers (and some literally are doing that now). And what happens when they run out of cash on hand, as in euros? Plus even if Greece gets drachma into circulation, which is a twelve to eighteen month project (it’s not just the printing, the physical distribution, as in getting it into ATMs, is a huge task, and you also have to have the coding done to support that), foreign suppliers will want euros, so you’ll also have foreign exchange risk. Greece is not self sufficient in food and supplies will start getting tight as of the end of July. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
