Warning: Greece Can Break Glass and Leave the Eurozone
One of the things that has been intriguing about the handwringing among European policy-makers has been the general refusal to consider the idea that one of the countries being wrung dry by doomed-to-fail austerity programs might just pack up and quit the Eurozone. The assumptions have been three fold. One is a knee-jerk assumption that the costs of exiting are prohibitive (this argument comes from Serious Economists in Europe, but they never compare it to the hard costs of austerity and the less readily measured but no less real cost of loss of sovereignity). Second is that an exit would come via a country being expelled, since the Eurozone treaties prohibit unilateral departure. Third is that it would be too much of an operational mess to revive a defunct currency.
A very good piece by Floyd Norris in the New York Times fills this gap by describing that Greece has the motivation and the means to leave.
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