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May 06, 2011

Guess who could be leaving the eurozone ...

Shockingly, it's not Germany, threatening to remove itself from a bunch of blood-sucking southern European leeches.

Instead, it's one of the leeches, Greece, who wants to leave. Even more surprisingly, Germany's governing Christian Democrats are threatening to stop the move.

And, a new Greek drachma or whatever wouldn't be worth the paper on which it was printed:
"It would lead to a considerable devaluation of the new (Greek) domestic currency against the euro," (a German Finance Ministry) paper states. According to German Finance Ministry estimates, the currency could lose as much as 50 percent of its value, leading to a drastic increase in Greek national debt. Schäuble's staff have calculated that Greece's national deficit would rise to 200 percent of gross domestic product after such a devaluation. "A debt restructuring would be inevitable," his experts warn in the paper. In other words: Greece would go bankrupt.

It remains unclear whether it would even be legally possible for Greece to depart from the euro zone. Legal experts believe it would also be necessary for the country to split from the European Union entirely in order to abandon the common currency. ...

What is certain, according to the assessment of the German Finance Ministry, is that the measure would have a disastrous impact on the European economy.

"The currency conversion would lead to capital flight," they write. And Greece might see itself as forced to implement controls on the transfer of capital to stop the flight of funds out of the country. "This could not be reconciled with the fundamental freedoms instilled in the European internal market," the paper states.

It's a threat serious enough to get a special EU meeting called, though.

But, not everybody outside of Greece thinks it's either legally impossible or economically foolish for Greece to do this.

Unfortunately, I don't see a new Krugman blog up on this yet.

Update, May 9: Still no Krugman column on this, but Mark Weisbrot totally agrees. As an analogy, he cites Argentina a decade ago decoupling from the dollar.

At the same time, leaving the Euro would force Greece to sink or swim on its own on facing up to massive tax avoidance, etc.

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