The fact that Greece is submitting to being shoved hard into even deeper economic misery and the loss of much of its sovereignty should in and of itself serve as an indirect proof of the fact that a Grexit would be even worse. We’ve argued that the acute distress created by two weeks of a bank holiday was only a mild foretaste of what was in store. Greece would lose much if not all of its tourist industry (18% of GDP) and would find it difficult to impossible to import, when Greece is not self sufficient in food and imports petroleum and pharmaceuticals. Experts were warning that if the bank holiday persisted much longer, not only would more businesses fail, but food shortages, which were starting to take hold, would become a problem by the end of July.
Readers had a great deal of difficulty accepting that in the case of a Grexit, it would take far longer than they imagined to get physical currency in circulation, and that that was actually easy compared to the systems issues. Many commentors seemed unable to grasp how they are so dependent on functioning payment systems that they have difficulty thinking through what not having them implies. Try imagining a world without an electrical grid for the foreseeable future. While they decay slower than that of a power outage, the level of disruption over time becomes similar. full: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/bank-it-grexit-and-systemic-risk.html _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
