The game of words continues, and following reports both yesterday and today that first Germany, and then Greece would compromise, and in the case of the latter even do "whatever it can" to reach a deal, it is time for Europe's bad cop, Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem, to pour cold water on the party and crush Greek enthusiasm even more when he said moments ago that he was "very pessimistic" about the chances that a meeting he will chair on Monday of euro zone finance ministers would reach a final debt deal with Greece.
Cited by Reuters, he said that Greek voters' expectations of their new government were "a mile high", Dutch finance minister Dijsselbloem was asked whether a plan to resolve Athens' financial problems would be achieved on Monday. He replied, in a remark aired on Dutch television: "I’m really still very pessimistic about that now."
Which was to be expected: after all the message from Europe all along has been that Greeks have to temper their expectations, and that Tsipras' promises (which were quantified by some as costing north of €20 billion) are simply unachievable. It also means that we are back to square one, where Europe continues to dangle the sword of illiquidity and the threat of a bank run as its primary leverage over the new Greek government.
To be sure, as we reported first thing today [6], the Greek liquidity situation is now rapidly deteriorating, confirmed moments ago also by Reuters [7]which quoted the infamous anonymous banking source said that there was a mix of reasons for the action. "Some banks likely needed to tap more ELA," said the senior banker at one of the country's four top banks. "(But) I believe the ECB wanted to allow some headroom, liquidity comfort until Feb. 18."
He said recent daily outflows were in the region of 300 million to 500 million euros on average.
Another executive at a big bank cited a similar figure.
"Outflows continued this week, the situation showed a deterioration in the last days," he said. "When you see 400-500 million euros of outflows a day, this shows a developing trend."
He added that outflows may have gone as high 1 billion euros on some days.
In other words, the deposit outflows will continue until Greek government morale is crushed.
