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If the Greeks were to vote ‘No’ what would happen next? Well no one can say. But here is a quick thought on what I hope the Greek government might have been exploring if they are excluded from the euro. It’s just food for thought nothing more. They have to be prepared to have a currency that does not depend on Europe supplying Euros. So they will need another currency – hopefully their own. I think we can be sure no western company has been printing them. There are few such companies and there is, I think, no possibility that...

Greece has threatened to seek a court injunction against the EU institutions, both to block the country's expulsion from the euro and to halt asphyxiation of the banking system. “The Greek government will make use of all our legal rights,” said the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. “We are taking advice and will certainly consider an injunction at the European Court of Justice. The EU treaties make no provision for euro exit and we refuse to accept it. Our membership is not negotiable,“ he told the Telegraph.

It is always those in the middle -- and especially what Marxist intellectuals call the petit bourgeois, the aspiring, hard-working workers and savers -- who are hurt the hardest It was Adam Smith who put it best. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”, he wrote in reply to an over-excited young man who thought that Great Britain was facing devastation after a setback during the US war of independence. Smith was right about the specifics as well as the general point, of course: America was thankfully soon to win its independence, and both Britain and the...

The Greek parliament is in session on Saturday evening as lawmakers debate the country's EMU fate and vote on the referendum called by PM Alexis Tsipras just after midnight this morning. TSIPRAS SAYS REFERENDUM WILL BE MOMENT OF TRUTH FOR CREDITORS TSIPRAS: GREEK PROPOSAL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEAL STILL ON TABLE TSIPRAS SAYS REFERENDUM NOT MEANT AS RUPTURE WITH EUROPE TSIPRAS SAYS GAME OF BAILOUT HAS COME TO AN END GREEK PARLIAMENT TO RESUME IN 10 MIN AHEAD OF REFERENDUM VOTE SAMARAS SAYS REFERENDUM DRAGS COUNTRY OUT OF EUROPE SAMARAS SAYS CREDITORS DISCUSSING PLAN B FOR GREECE STATE MINISTER PAPPAS SAYS...

Either Greece’s banks will open on Monday and Christos Dranos’s butcher’s shop will still be in business. Or they won’t and his shop and the country’s ties to the Euro will be in serious peril.... Greece’s banks suffered a €4.2 billion ($5.8 billion) run last week ahead of an emergency European Union summit called for Monday in Brussels on the country’s deepening debt crisis and the continuing standoff between Athens and its foreign creditors.... A continuing rush for cash at ATM machines over the weekend suggests that panic has already set in. But beaches and coffee shops in Athens were...

Domingo Tortorelli promised the Uruguayan people the earth: a milk fountain at every street corner, a working day of no longer than 15 minutes and a fuel-saving road from the capital Montevideo to Rivera, more than 300 miles away, that would slope downhill in both directions.

Here is what you need to know now as Greece enters a pivotal week in its testy relationship with the Eurozone: 1. Greece’s most immediate – as in first thing Monday morning – source of danger is its banking system. To compensate for accelerated deposit flight, the European Central Bank injected additional emergency funding on Friday to allow the banks to open on Monday. With a lot more needed, the ECB will grow more hesitant to pump in new money unless the Greek government secures an agreement with its European partners and the institutions through which they operate (the European...

https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/609341858045497344 https://twitter.com/TraderStef/status/609355146842275840 https://twitter.com/JAFF3/status/609343992803774464 https://twitter.com/russian_market/status/609341880623591424 The bank runs (and capital controls) begin. Macedonia Central Bank Governor Bogov states: *GREEK BANKS IN MACEDONIA CAN’T WITHDRAW CASH: BOGOV*MACEDONIAN BANKS PROTECTED IN CASE OF GREXIT: BOGOV How long before the rest of Europe follows suit and a bank holiday is declared Monday to "Cyprus" depositors? He further added: *MACEDONIAN CENTRAL BANK SEES MAJOR RISKS FROM POLITICAL CRISIS http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-12/macedonia-central-bank-blocks-greek-bank-withdrawals-case-grexit Macedonia Central Bank blocks Greek bank withdrawals FXStreet (Córdoba) - Macedonian Central Bank's Governor Dimitar Bogov has stated that Greek banks are not able to withdraw cash. According to Bogov, this withdrawal halt is protection against...

Germany and France have agreed to forge closer Eurozone ties without reopening the bloc’s treaties, a report in France has claimed. The move is seemingly designed to undermine UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempts to renegotiate his country’s ties to the EU. France’s Le Monde newspaper revealed this week that French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed to forge a tighter political union among those countries in the single currency. […] It comes as the UK Prime Minister is due in Paris and Berlin later this week as part of his charm offensive to convince the...

On Thursday morning, we took an in-depth look at what the progression of events is likely to be in the event a cash-strapped, negotiation-weary Greece finally, for lack of will or for lack of options, fails to scrape together enough cash to pay its creditors. As BofAML notes, a missed IMF payment and/or failure to make interest payments to either the ECB or private creditors over the coming weeks would likely lead to default within 30 days, at which point "mark-to-fantasy" becomes mark-to-market and then "mark-to-default" in very short order. Although Greek officials came out midday with a “categorical” denial...

A top German body has called for a clear mechanism to force Greece out of the euro if the left-wing Syriza government repudiates the terms of the country’s €245bn rescue. “Financial support must be cut off if Greece does not comply with its reform commitments,” said the Institute of German Economic Research (IW). "If Greece is going to take a tough line, then Europe will take a tough line as well." IW is the second German institute in two days to issue a blunt warning to the new Greek premier, Alexis Tsipras, who has vowed to halt debt payments and...

<p>Today German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed Greek Diplomatic Offensive Is Failing.</p> <p>Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc in parliament has agreed not to give in to any “bad compromise that “defacto adds up to a debt writedown,” Hans-Peter Friedrich, a deputy leader of the caucus, said in an interview today.</p>

China's Real Estate Market Crashing... Real Estate is the single biggest domestic lending segment in China. Combined with deflation in Iron Ore, Steel, Copper, and other industrial metals China's collateral quality is looking very very shaky compared to loan volume... SNIP While the world's attention is glued to events in Greece, the real action continues to evolve quietly thousands of kilometers east, in China, where the near record surge in new loans remains unable to offset the dramatic slowdown in shadow banking issuance. And while China's bubble-chasing, animal spirits have recently reoriented themselves from real estate to the stock market,...

With tax receipts tumbling and ELA funding hitting its limit, the Greeks are up against it. On the other side, the Greek strength in the face of EU's demands (and Eurogroup's realization of the uncertainty this could lead to) has apparently led to the start of compromise. As Bloomberg reports, •*GERMAN, GREEK OFFICIALS SIGNAL COMMON GROUND ON AID DEAL •*GERMANY SAID NOT TO INSIST ALL PARTS OF CURRENT BAILOUT STAY •*GREECE SAID TO BE OPEN TO SURPLUS, PRIVATIZATION DEBATE As Merkel noted earlier, "Europe is always about finding a compromise," and it appears they are getting closer - as long...

The former head of the US central bank, Alan Greenspan, has predicted that Greece will have to leave the eurozone. He told the BBC he could not see who would be willing to put up more loans to bolster Greece's struggling economy. Greece wants to re-negotiate its bailout, but Mr Greenspan said "I don't think it will be resolved without Greece leaving the eurozone". Earlier, UK Chancellor George Osborne said a Greek exit would cause "deep ructions" for Britain. Mr Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, said: "I believe (Greece) will eventually leave. I don't think...