Preparing for Greece's Failure - European Current Events

 Peter Zeihan

Vice President of Analysis Peter Zeihan examines the obstacles to Greek prosperity and the challenges in ejecting Greece from the eurozone.

The financial news of the week again is about the eurozone and we are seeing lots of entities come up with lots of possible solutions about how to solve the eurozone problem. They all of course rest on what to do about Greece. The problem is, they are coming from the wrong angle. From STRATFOR’s point of view, Greece does not have a particularly bright future as a state before the eurozone crisis is taken into account.

Modern Greece has traditionally been supported by three pillars. First is shipping. As a culture that is mostly coastal it makes sense they would be very good at sailing; however, in the age of modern transport and super container ships, Greece simply can’t compete, and most of its ship building industry has long ago left for greener pastures in places such as Norway, China or Korea. The second pillar is tourism and this continues to be an option, but tourism by itself cannot support a modern state. The final option and the one that the Greeks have gotten the most mileage out of is leveraging Greece’s position. Typically to allow some external power a means of battling somebody in Greece’s neighborhood. When Greece achieved independence in the early 1800’s that external power was the United Kingdom who used Greece as a foil against the Turks. Later, the Americans played a similar role supporting Greece against the Soviets. In both cases massive volumes of capital came in to support Greece. However, in the post-Cold War era Turkey is a member of NATO, and while the Greeks might not get along with the Turks, nobody is looking to use Greece as a military foil against them. Greece no longer has a regional foe that it shares with anyone else. The closest might be the Turks again, but only if the Turks miscalculate their ongoing relationship with Israel or Cyprus and miscalculate very very badly.

Bottom-line, the various supports that have allow the Greek state to exist since the 1820’s simply aren’t there anymore and so the path forward goes like this: Greece is not salvageable. Greece simply can’t compete unless it is being given a constant, steady supply of capital from abroad that it doesn’t necessarily have to pay back. And even if that could be restarted, Greece can not emerge from its own debt load. It is simply too large. Greece has to be kicked out of the eurozone if the euro is to survive, but between here and there, first, a firebreak fund. The EFSF expansion has to happen because if you cannot sequester the 280 billion euro of Greek government debt that exists outside of Greece, then you’re going to trigger a massive financial catastrophe that the eurozone simply can’t survive. And so to prepare for a Greek ejection, you have to prepare a fund that can handle three things more or less simultaneously. First, you need about 400 billion euro to firebreak Greece off from the rest of eurozone. Second, you need about 800 billion euro in order to prevent a wide-scale banking meltdown, because the day that Greece defaults on that debt, the day that it’s ejected from eurozone, there will be catastrophic banking collapses in Portugal, Italy, Spain and France, probably in that order.

Third, the markets will go wild and the state that is in the most danger of falling after Greece is Italy. Using the bailouts that have happened to date as a template, any bailout of Italy would have to provide enough financing to cover all Italian needs for three years. That comes out to about another 800 billion euro. So until the Europeans have 2 trillion euro in funding stashed away, they can’t kick Greece out of the system.

Preparing for Greece's Failure is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

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