Living in Greece in such uncertain times, just not knowing what will happen next - will the country have to leave the EZ, leave the EU? Are drachmas being printed up, just in case? Journalists are writing that capital controls may be implemented just before the upcoming Greek Easter holiday or even of the Greek banks possibly being nationalized. There is also talk of another snap election being called.
Luckily I do not live there any longer. However, my family does. They faced losing their business but were able to arrange a loan in the hope of keeping it going long enough to sell it.
Greece is no longer at the edge of the abyss, they have fallen in. They may be able to make the IMF payment of 450 million Euros due on April 9, but will they also be able to pay salaries and pensions if they do? There have been conflicting reports and who knows at this point what may happen next?
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A top US State Department official had met recently in Athens with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Greece's Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis met yesterday with IMF's Christine Lagarde in Washington DC and today Varoufakis was to meet with US Treasury officials.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras prepares to leave for Russia to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, April 8.
Perhaps the meetings in DC yesterday between Lagarde and Varoufakis (as if they could not more easily have met in Europe) has something to do with Varoufakis's meeting with US officials today. If the West were to lose Greece that would be fraught with peril on so many levels, not to mention the loss of the US military base on the Greek island of Crete which has been used by the US for its wars in the Middle East and is extremely important location to US interests.
Will there be a "Turn to Moscow"?
Deepening ties between Greece's new government and Russia have set off alarm bells across Europe, as the leaders in Athens wrangle with international creditors over reforms needed to avoid bankruptcy. While Greece may be eyeing Moscow as a bargaining chip, some fear it is inexorably moving away from the West, towards a more benevolent ally, a potential investor and a creditor.
A global survey by the Pew Research Center from September 2013 found that 63% of Greeks held favourable views of Russia. Only 23% of Greeks had a positive view of the EU last autumn, in the latest Eurobarometer survey.
http://www.bbc.com/...
How did Greece arrive at this situation?
Greece: An Economic Tragedy in Six Charts.......
The country’s descent into its difficulties is narrated and visualized through six charts, focusing on the severity of the economic recession and compression of government expenditure, as well as the increase in the public debt and its shift from the hands of the foreign private sector to the foreign official sector.
US diplomats fear that the hard line creditors are taking could backfire. Too much attention, they say, is being paid to the pressure of bailout concerns at the expense of geopolitical power and the influence that Greece exerts at the crossroads of east and west. Regionally, few places are as important as the southern island of Crete, home to facilities that provide command control and logistics support to US and Nato operating forces.
If Athens were to turn its back on the west, Turkey could be next. “Greece is much more important than people think,” the former US ambassador to Greece, Daniel Speckhard, told a recent edition of Fortune magazine. “The conventional wisdom is now that we can allow a Grexit and just cauterise the wound, but it’s not that simple.”
http://www.theguardian.com/...
A bit of Greek music and dancing to enertain you while you read.......