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Greek Businesses Accept Lira, Lev As Grexit Looms
With the Greek drama headed into its final act and Alexis Tsipras stuck between an obstinate Germany and a recalcitrant Left Platform, many wonder if the introduction of an alternative currency in Greece is now a foregone conclusion.
Even if Athens and Brussels manage to strike a deal over the weekend, the country still faces an acute cash shortage and a severe credit crunch that threatens to create a scarcity of critical imported goods.
Amid the chaos, the Greek Drachma has made two mysterious appearances this week (see here and here), suggesting that the EU is on the verge of forcing the Greek economy into the adoption of a parallel currency and while this week’s Drachma “sightings” might properly be called anecdotal, a report from Kathimerini and comments from deposed FinMin Yanis Varoufakis suggest redenomination rumors are not entirely unfounded.
Now, with the ECB set to cut Greek banks off from the ELA lifeline on Monday morning in the absence of a deal, some businesses are mitigating the liquidity shortage by accepting foreign currency. FT has more:
Like many Bulgarians, Kostadin Dobrev, is a regular visitor to the beaches and bars of northern Greece. But this week, the holidaying firefighter immediately noticed things were different. First, the shops were half-empty. Then, even more surprising, he found Greek hotels and restaurants were happy to accept the Bulgarian lev.
As Europe’s politicians prepare for a weekend summit to decide whether Greece can stay in the eurozone, Mr Dobrev’s experience highlights how the old certainties are collapsing. By early next week Greeks could be preparing for life outside the euro and a possible return to the drachma.
Many Greeks in the retail and leisure industry say it makes increasing sense to accept Bulgarian and Turkish money at a time when tourism, the country’s economic lifeblood, is under threat. The tourism confederation said last-minute bookings plummeted 30-40 per cent, compared with the same period in 2014, after Greece imposed capital controls last week.
Athanasos Kritsinis, who runs the Krita chain of supermarkets, said Bulgarians visiting his shops in the northern cities of Xanthi and Komotini were paying in leva.
“There is nothing bad in accepting Bulgarian leva because it is stable and pegged to the euro so why not accept to do business with it? It is legal. There is no reason not to accept,” he said.
Yes, "no reason not to accept." There are however, quite a few reasons for Germany "not to accept" Tsipras' latest proposal and for Greeks "not to accept" a deal that flies in the face of a referendum outcome that's not even a week old.
And so as we kick off yet another weekend where all eyes turn nervously to Brussels on Saturday and to Athens on Sunday, the million dollar question seems to be this: what will the preferred payment method be in Greece this time next week? Lira, lev, drachma, or euro?
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Ha,ha... It ain't over until the fat "German" lady sings.
horse manure is more valuable then fiat ( euro, usd, yean, ruble etc)
Are you kidding me! Horse manuer is a great additive to your soil to grow wonderful produce and great feed for warms to which in turn create the most expensive compost on the market!
bitcoin seemed to take a massive shit on PM today ..... Your thoughts ........
The Fat Lady is about to sing in America.. More testimonies now coming in re Russian troops in America to help enforce Martial Law!
Just added to a long list of others I have been compiling...
http://revelation12.ca/?p=11
Hillary Clinton is really the ghost of the "Bride of Frankenstein", and she never allows close up photos, in order to conceal the charging bolts/electrodes sticking out of her neck.
~ Let's keep it real people.~
Pull my finger
That's no way to talk about Cankles.
From your link " p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 120%; }
" He said they separatHe said they separated men and women with some children. But he also said they were separating people by religious beliefs. My relative believes that they are going to exterminate Christians when the timeed men and women with some children. But he also said they were separating people by religious beliefs. My relative believes that they are going to exterminate Christians when the time comes"
Hasn't anybody told you that the Russians ARE CHRISTIANS You Numbscull?
We told you to BTFD.
All paper currency is fiat and has zero value because the treasuries that back the currency are broke.
They will EVENTUALLY be worth nothing. But not today.
From the time the US became involved in WWII the war lasted 3 years 9 months.
This god damn Greece bullshit has been going on for 5 god damn years.
Why women should not be in politics. Nothing gets done: Lagarde/Merkel.
Women are for breeding and making sandwiches.... that's it. They have no purpose on the world stage.
We've been at war with those evil terrorists since 2001.
Fourteen fucking years of forming dissent around the world while lining the pockets of the MIC and their congress critter bitches.
USA, USA, USA!
Hilary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Victoria Nuland, Valerie Jarret, Katherine Archuleta, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Kathleen Seblius.
Do I need to say ANYTHING else?
Get back in the kitchen bitches. You've done enough damage.
The last time I checked the U.S. has been at war since 1990, If you don't count the proxy wars between Vietnam and 1990.
The Rothschilds have done very well.
Women sandwiches? Taste like small kittens?
You got me there ....
Mmmm, small kittens. Almost as tender as baby seals or, that ever so rare delicacy, spotted owl.
@One And only: That's like saying men are only born to cause destruction and misery among humanity for centuries! They should be aborted before they are born... and that's it!
Why men should not be in politics. Nothing ever gets done or everything gets done the opposite of what we ask for: Obama/ Clinton/ Bushes! Feel free to add to the list!
Of course we should keep few purposefully selected men for breeding purposes or I guess we can alway use cloning.
Now GET OFF your high horse and GET to your grave already you old hag!
greece is fairly well positioned really with a tourism based economy if they don't scare everyone away. get paid in euro, pounds, dollars, lira, whatever and pay out in nothing. time to go to the mattresses bitchez. if they really want to piss off merkel they should redenominate all the domestic mortgages to drachma.
Yes, buzz, but high tourist season on the Med is only a couple of months.
Maybe they could take a few lessons from Holland;)
yah. legalize weed and prostitution and the "high" season would be extended well past two months.
Herpes is forever.
There will never be a Greek tourist economy that can support a Greek welfare state.
Keep the positive Greek propaganda going till market close. Gonna be a very interesting weekend.
How about THIS 'foreign' currency: silver.
By Monday, they will be "accepting" toilet paper and cigarettes,
and glad to have them.
us and turkish cigs are currency bitchez
Gold seem more appealing but that's me.
Sounds Un-"Leavened" to me, I say go for it...Kparve of course
Its on like stupid. Accepting Lira? wahahahaha. None of these noobs know what hard currency is with no third party risk?
Perhaps but they understand a bird in hand beats two in the bush.
You-a wanna paya lira ora staya somewhere-a else-a? Bringa the-a lira-a-a-a-a.
I hope Greece gets the bail out. Max out the credit card at Germany's expense one last time before defaulting on the entire thing the day before the next payment is due.
Then, Greece should turn around and sue Germany for €1 trillion claiming predatory lending, as that they should've known better than to extend more credit to someone that they knew couldn't pay it back.
It's worked before and how things are now done in our Krugman Keynesian run victim economy.
I can't get it out of my head this entire "Curriculum Vitae" is nothing more than the Staying Alive scene in the movie Airplane with Prime Minister Tsyprus being the "last pilot left and have to land Plane Greece."
I have to admit though those are serious concessions....and a terribly well written and detailed document.
"Hammerin Hank" got the US Congress to cough up 750 BILLION dollars in TWO PARAGRAPHS!
So yes...indeed....Aristphones is alive and well these days.
Even if they accept and even if if if the Greek parliament agrees to it, the actions agreed to will never be taken, and we'll be back here in 3 months with another 100 billion blown with nothing to show for it. Schauble knows this as well as anyone. They could write offf 100% of the debt and Greece wwould just carry on as before.
so let me see, another currency brought forth out of debt is stable cause its linked to the Euro which comes forth out of debt?????
ok, i got it.
It works as long as Europeans do not pin the dots together as you have done. Everything is good! Spend now!
Greeks will also accept small gold coins I read. The small business owner is in a tough spot there; he has some stuff/services top sell and consumers need stuff/services to buy.
The grey/black market figures a way so people and businesses can survive but theyall have to be flexible and resilient.
Decentralization bitchez. And freegold/silver. Just kill the dirty float. Just kill it. It's my fucking money.
There is no Grexit anymore, Tsipras has folded. He has folded in the manner only the pussies of the Left can: TOTALLY.
Why do you assume the Greek people have any obligation to either listen to or follow Tsipras?
Neither will happen, and THAT is the biggest fear of the Troika: Loss of the Greek state's authority to ENFORCE austerity. They tried to prevent that by making most Greeks dependent on the state since the real default in 2009. That part worked, but the Greeks are still defiant. They are too pissed off to ever respect the current Greek government or any agreements with foreign powers it makes on their behalf.
The Greeks recognize Tsipras as head of a foreign corporation that does not have the Greek people's best interests in mind. Socialist leaders cling to power far more than right-wing nutjobs. The 'messy' part of Grexit is yet to come.
Yes he got rid of Varoufakis for dare telling the Truth.
Varoufakis looks the ONLY genuine ex-politician in the EU and despite NEVER losing a VOTE is GONE.
Nonsense. They voted for him just a few months ago.
Or do you have specific sources? A survey from a representative sample of Greeks, perhaps? No? Didn't think so.
If they hadn't demanded free shit then put in place governments who promised to make it happen (those promises were in fact made good), this would not, could not, have happened.
The Troika Taliban continually reverts to the exact logic you are employing:
20% got no - as in ZERO - personal benefit from any Greek policies in the past. It doesn't matter that 80% did - you can control that 80% easy; they'll do what they're told. The other 20% are young, unemployed, zero-benefit, getting fucked over for the crimes of someone else and now living in a dismal shithole of a nation. They don't like politicians - theirs, German, French,... ANY politicians. They are tired and just want things to end. Tsipras made the mistake of giving those people - that 20% - reason to hope with the referendum. Not that they would get any free shit, because they never got any to begin with. Tsipras gave them hope that it would just finally end and things would start to change.
The first rule of maintaining political power is that you NEVER give people with nothing left to lose a little hope that things will change now for the better. There are absolutely NO negative incentives any more to keep them from the pitchforks and torches. That doesn't apply to 80% of the Greeks because they DO have somethign to lose. Fuck your surveys - I don't give a shit what that 80% want or think. Everyone already knows, and everyone knows they are not going to do SHIT about it one way or the other.
That other 20%? That was just the wrong segment to piss off - a fatal blunder by TPTB. Survey? Watch the 20% start to tear Greece apart in the next few weeks. 20% is probably a pretty healthy number - I don't think the Colonies even had that many pissed off rebels before they started the revoution that founded my country. Terrorists, one and all. Let's see what the Greeks got.
I lived in Greece back in the 1970's when the Drachma was still the currency. My landlord would give me a 20% discount on my rent if I paid in US twenty dollar bills. That was no problem since my employer paid in US dollars. There was a thriving black market with great deals - if you had US dollars. Unfortunately, at least 50% of the black market 'entrepreneurs' were rip-off artists.
If you travel the world in underdeveloped countries, expecially Africa, the US dollar is accepted and preferred.
WHEN Greece goes back to the Drachma, I will bet most cash transactions will still be in Euros.
Yes, I also rented a house on one of the Kykladic islands between 1982 and 2010, whilst based in London and Amsterdam during that period. Watched the introduction of the Euro to Greece as a neatly triangulated observer: 'Euroskeptic London', SuperProEuro Holland (MSM narrative), and consumer/participant in the Greek 'economy'. Apart from the many many hard currency exchanges in Syntagma, there were also numerours individuals both Greek and non-Greek who had relatives/business interests/holidays planned etc who would gladly exchange Drachmae for Swiss, DM, GBP, $US or $AU at above official exchange rate.
There are 'money changers' everywhere, and when cut out of an 'official' MOE system, crafty humans improvise quite well...often better than when fully 'controlled' (predicates having another currency to exchange of course, therefore not a kind alternative for those destititue in Greece or elsewhere). There were enough black marketeers around Syntagma to find competitive exchange rates. On the islands, not so many.
As enduring as they are (Ottoman occupation, WW2 invasion, juntas, financial collapses, decades of grinding poverty for the masses etc), I fear for the Greek peoples now. There appears to be a semi systemic assault on Orthodox Christian populations: Serbia, Russia, and Greece (as well as the slaughter of millions of EuroChristians during the last 100 years). Why? And to whose benefit? Furthermore, the symbolism of collapsing the 'Birthplace of Democracy' seems more than symbolic. More like a deliberate transition to the alternative, a 'causal' segue into the pyramidal topdown diktat of the unelected 'authority'. The overplan of the EU from the outset, and a 'Region2' beta test for GloBAALisation. PS. that comes with Tabula Rasa: the erasing of history so that in several generations personal and collective memory will have been fully re-written by the 'victors' (having destroyed the traditional methods that cultures pass on their history and the ancient physical reminders of our roots - architectural, monuments, and landscape destroyed, religions and books burned, data and minds erased electromagnetically or overwritten with alternative narratives and memes).
I cannot imagine the US allowing Greece to chose the protection of Russia. There will be a military coup in Greece if necessary or a 'coloured uprising'. Nudelman has already visited. I doubt if it will be necessary because Tsiparis appears to have folded, and Varoufakis has departed 'for family reasons' (depart or we kill your family?), or to prepare/be prepared for elevation. NATO under treaty provisions, is obliged to come to the aid of any member state under attack. Why is the IMF headquarters or Bundestag therefore not currently surrounded by tanks, as a result of the financial attack on Greece? More likely IMHO is an 'event' which requires that NATO 'rescues' Greece. If indeed the US has underwritten this next play to prevent Grexit into the arms of Moscow, in order to maintain NATO's southern flank (the principle reason for GS cooking the Greek books to fit the Maastricht criteria to join the EZ), expect to see a mild backdown of Scheizzball and Druggie. Germany is afterall still a US conquest, with no peace treaty signed after WW2 until the "Two-Plus Four" Treaty in 1990. The notion of the 'Fatherland' was put to rest by the post WW2 German Constitution (authored principally by/at the victors at the London 6-Power Conference in 1948) and education system redirected 'away from Nazi ideals', ie toward the Allies ideals. The ECB is a quasi reserve bank, part of the international fiat structure. Plus the NSA has EVERYTHING on EVERYONE of political and/or criminal importance in the entire EU (+ world).
The Euro can-kick-kabuki could then extend and pretend for another few months until the endgame, as a lit Fiscalnuke attached to the debt pendulum, which is being swung harder and harder against the walls of the current cukoo clock. When that explodes, it will be time for the Technocracy, (those enabled by AI and that anticipate introducing a digital global slave credit system after the destruction of 'the capitalist era'), to to claim that only a gloBAAList SUPRAsovereign structure will have the ability to 'prevent such a catastrophic collapse' in the future. A fitting outcome for the Nihilists; to inherit a Fukued, Geo-engineered, methaneated dying planet. Good luck with that one...
You know it's bad when you have to turn to the Lev for safe haven.
Ha-ha! Never imagined I'll see a bank note of our currency pictured at ZH
Congratulations! Are you going to vacation in Greece this summer?
Drachma, Lira, Lev, Euro, Dollar ... for whatever.
For everything else there is MASTERcard!
(Or as in soccer, Merkel card?)
Trading in alternate currencies is de facto exit from the Euro. And once alternate currencies are in circulation on a regular basis, return to the old system is difficult or impossible.
For example, a tourist pays the restaurant in dollars, the restaurant pays their supplier in dollars, the supplier pays their shipper in dollars, and the Euro is out of the picture. If there aren't enough dollars, then some other currency will be used.
I would be nice to the Greeks and pay with a credit card.
Greek Government announces it is accepting BitCoin in 5...4...3...2...
Italy probably wishes it had its Lire back too.
The ECBanksters are blackmailing the Greeks. No ifs or buts, they ARE
Install the Drach, peg to Euro, lie and claim tax revenues increase every year, pay towards EU debt. That might be what the US is already doing... Who watches big brother?