The Eurozone: On the Road to Recovery With a Lingering Risk

March 4, 2015

4 minute read

The Greek government is already taunting the Eurogroup with creative drachma notes designs (Greece will need take lessons from Zimbabwe and add a few zeros to some of these notes).

Source: @AmbroseEP

As these deposits leave, Greek banks lose their limited sources of private funding and increasingly rely on the Bank of Greece for the emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) loans. In fact investors have little confidence that the banks are sufficiently capitalized after the last bailout to withstand this transition. That's why today alone, the banking sector took a 10% hit.

Why does this relatively small nation present such a risk to the Eurozone's nascent recovery? The ELA loans are financed via Target2 as the Bank of Greece borrows from the Eurosystem. In a Grexit scenario the Bank of Greece will be unable (or unwilling) to repay these loans, forcing the Eurosystem (the ECB) to take a significant hit.

There is no question that the EMU will easily withstand such an event - it's not a great sum of money in the larger scheme of things. But the loss of confidence and the political nightmare associated with recapitalizing the ECB as well as the fears of contagion to other periphery nations may send the euro area back into recession. Will depositors in Italy, Portugal, and Spain begin to move their deposits out as well in order to avoid being "drachmatized"? Economists often forger, it's less about the specific euro amounts and more about the psychology of fear.

If however the Eurogroup manages to somehow stabilize the Greek situation, a steady economic recovery could be in store for the Eurozone. The next few months will be crucial.

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Sober Look was founded by Walter Kurtz, a New York based hedge fund manager and credit markets specialist.