The surprise move by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to submit to a popular referendum on 5 July the proposals of international institutions (EU, ECB, IMF) that the government in Athens did not feel like signing despite the latest openings of the Europe has completely overturned the table, bringing any hypothesis of agreement to the high seas and rapidly approaching the danger of default, which risks being the antechamber of Greece's exit from the euro and perhaps from Europe.
As Christine Lagarde, head of the Monetary Fund, recalled, if Athens fails to pay the IMF debt installment by the deadline of Tuesday 30 June, Greece's technical default procedures will be triggered. But without a budget and a new aid plan from Europe for the next few hours, Athens will hardly be able to pay. And the German Finance Minister Schuaeble was very harsh: "With the move of the referendum, Athens has closed the negotiations" and without an agreement it will not be able to get new aid. the extension of aid to after July 5 requested by the Greek finance minister, Varoufakis, has been rejected. All that remains is plan B.
This is why this afternoon's Eurogroup is studying an emergency plan to prevent all hell from unleashing hell when the markets reopen on Monday and that in Athens the rush to ATMs becomes an assault on bank branches to withdraw deposits.
The central idea of the emergency plan, if a way is not found to extend the shorter payment deadlines, is to take an extraordinary political decision that gives the ECB the green light so that the central bank can continue to disburse for a short time time emergency loans to Greek banks even though there are no regulatory conditions.
It is not excluded that there will also be a block on capital movements to prevent large quantities of resources from escaping from Greece in the midst of an emergency.
Tsipras' move is a move of desperation and an attempt to leave the final decisions to the people in the absence of a certain majority in Parliament that can approve the international plan on Greece, but the political consequences will not be long in coming, if it is true that, despite the different opinion of the Athens government, polls show that 60% of Greeks are ready to accept Brussels' proposals in order to remain in the euro and in Europe.
But now the games are more open than ever and the alarm on the euro and on Greece has returned very high.
