By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Markets have woken up to Greek nuclear risk.
Bank stocks in Athens have crashed 44pc since Alexis Tsipras swept into power this week with a mandate to defy the European power structure.
Contrary to expectations, Mr Tsipras has not resiled from a long list of campaign pledges that breach the terms of Greece’s EU-IMF Troika Memorandum and
therefore put the country on a collision course with Brussels and Berlin.He told his cabinet he is willing to negotiate on demands for debt relief but will not abandon core promises. “We will not seek a catastrophic solution, but neither will we consent to a policy of submission,” he said.
If anything, he is upping the ante, going into coalition with a nationalist party even more hostile to the Troika, clearly gambling that Germany and the creditor powers will not let monetary union break apart at this late stage having already committed €245bn (£183bn), for to do so would shatter the illusion that the eurozone crisis has been solved.
“We will immediately stop any privatisation,” said Panagiotis Lafazanis, leader of the Marxist Left Platform, the biggest bloc in the Syriza pantheon.
Plans to sell the PPT power utility and the Piraeus Port have been halted. The minimum wage will be raised from €500 to €751 a month as a first order business, an explicit rejection of Troika austerity terms. We are witnessing a revolt. Never before have the EMU elites had to face such defiance on every front, and they have yet to experience the lacerating tongue of Yanis Varoufakis, a relentless critic of their 1930s ideology of debt-deflation and “fiscal waterboarding”.
Mr Varoufakis told me before becoming finance minister that Syriza will not capitulate even if the European Central Bank threatens to cut off €54bn of liquidity for the Greek banking system, a move that would force Greece to nationalise the banks, impose capital controls, and reintroduce the drachma within days. ..
His first act in office today was to announce that 600 cleaners in the finance ministry will regain their jobs, paid for by cutting financial advisers.
.. it is hard not to feel a welling sympathy for this revolt. If it takes a neo-Marxist like Alexis Tsipras to confront the elemental folly of EMU crisis strategy, so be it. ....
..... It is one thing to soften the terms of Greek debt repayments. It is another to overthrow the Troika altogether. “We expect them to fulfil everything that they have promised to fulfil,” said Jyrki Katainen, the EU’s economic enforcer.
The dawning awareness of this unbridgeable chasm is what is frightening investors, and events are now moving too fast to control. Barclays says capital flight may have reached €20bn since early December.
Greece will hit its first crunch-point at the end of February when its bail-out extension expires. No doubt there will be an emergency extension – perhaps a month – but the debt redemptions will pile up after that, culminating in a €7bn repayment to the ECB in July and August that Greece cannot meet.
Marcel Fratzscher, head of Berlin’s DIW institute in Berlin, told Reuters that Mr Tsipras is playing a “very dangerous game” that risks setting off a snowball. “If people start to believe that he is really serious, you could have massive capital flight and a bank run. You are quickly at a point where euro exit becomes possible,” he said.
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/...ces-nuclear-risk.html