default

The new Greek deal is "absolutely impossible, totally non-viable and toxic …[they were] the kind of proposals you present to another side when you don’t want an agreement." Speaking with The New Statesman, former Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis blasts Wolfgang Schaeuble's position which will lead to "a humanitarian crisis" for Greece and warns, regarding this latest creditors' proposal, "if anything it will be worse [for the Greeks]." His conclusion is succinct, "we were set up...," Merkel and Schäuble’s control over the Eurogroup is absolute, and that the group itself is beyond the law.

It was not today's IMF (non) repayment that traders, if not eurocrats and economists, are concerned about but tonight's maturity of a JPY 20 billion (about $160 million) Samurai note sold in 1995 and which matures on July 14. The reason why this paltry, in the grand scheme of things, payment is critical is that while continuing to repay the IMF is not an event of default if only purely technically, and for the rating agencies, a non-payment on the Samurai bond would start a cross-default cascade.

"In our view, there are two main factors keeping investors sidelined. One is the residual implementation risks involved in the latest arrangements...  The second, of much broader importance, is the accumulated evidence of the inadequacy of the Euro area's present fiscal governance, which takes up too many resources and exposes the whole system to collapse."

Now that Greece has capitulated and offered up its sovereignty in what can only be described as an unconditional surrender to Berlin and Brussels, here's what's next for the country, the government, and the Greek people.

Me: How are the talks going?
EU source: "Shitty."
Me: "Getting more shitty or less?"
Source: "Pretty steady level of shittiness

There is democratic capitalism, and there is fascist capitalism. What we have today is fascist capitalism; and the following will explain how it works, using as an example the case of Greece. Simply out - The whole system is a money-funnel, from the public, to the aristocracy.

Facing abject humiliation at the hands of the German finance ministry, Alexis Tsipras arrived at Sunday’s Eurosummit a broken man. Still, the PM did his best to fight the good fight, debating both the IMF's role in the third Greek program and the treatment of the country's debt with German Chancellor Merkel late Sunday evening in Brussels. 

The one undeniable truth about the debt drama in Greece is that each of the conventional narratives - financial, political and historical - has some claim of legitimacy. These facts matter not only because contagion from Greek debt defaults may ripple in dangerous ways through the financial system, but because they are also true for many other members of the Eurozone. The Euro is a fatally-flawed monetary concept and what we now seeing playing out was eminently predictable from the start.

If you can't print money or slash expenses, you have to borrow more money. That's the template not just for Greece, but for many state and local governments in the U.S who share key characteristics with Greece: they have soaring pension, Medicaid and employee healthcare obligations, but their tax revenues are either stagnant or prone to boom and bust cycles--and the current boom cycle is now entering the inevitable bust phase, when tax revenues plummet but the obligations just keep piling up. The template of over-indebtedness as a response to soaring obligations is scale-invariant, and it always ends the same way: default, more financial tricks to mask the default, and eventually, insolvency, bankruptcy and massive losses being distributed to everyone foolish enough to choose financial trickery over dealing with reality back when the pain would have been bearable.

Donald Trump is not a pleasant man. He is egotistical, vain, bombastic, often mean-spirited. He revels in his financial superiority, which he conflates with human goodness. When he contorts his mouth into a kind of tube as he talks, you brace yourself for something outrageous—and it nearly always emerges as expected. His likability quotient, at least in terms of his public persona, is down somewhere in single digits. And yet he has just taken hold of the American political system by the neck and doesn’t seem inclined to let go anytime soon.

Next week's key events and data, if we can look beyond Greece and China.

It was a weekend in which, according to traders, Greece facing an "absolutely final" was going to be saved. Instead, it may go down in history as the weekend in which the Eurozone finally split and its long-overdue disintegration began.

Tsipras betrayed the public trust last night when we rammed through a draft proposal for a Third Greek bailout, one which would push total Greek Debt/GDP over 200%, which the Greek population overwhelming rejected in a democratic vote last weekend. And now, it is up to Europe to decide if it will trust the Greek government, which clearly has no problem lying to anyone, to implement reforms which Greece has been unable to effect for over 5 years.

While the party in the 1990s ended badly, the festivities currently underway may end in outright disaster. The party-goers may not just awaken with hangovers, but with missing teeth, no memories, and Mike Tyson's tiger in their hotel room.

Spontaneous combustion. Alien invasion. Zombie apocalypse. What do these have in common? Their likelihood is next to impossible. So why worry? This is how people tend to think about the financial system. Mentioning even the possibility, for example, that the US could default on its debt is met with so much scorn and contempt it would be safer to stand on the street corner warning about an alien invasion. The same goes for the imposition of capital controls. Or a collapse in the banking system. Or a currency crisis. And yet the most casual glance at the headlines proves that these events not only can happen, they do happen... and for one underlying reason...