If Alexis Tsipras and sixty percent of the Greek public thought that their petulant temper tantrum was going to drive their German creditors before them, those delusions of grandeur have already been put to rest:
Germany said Monday that there was currently "no basis" for talks with Greece on a new bailout package or debt relief, following a resounding "No" in Sunday's referendum on creditors' proposals and further austerity.
"In light of yesterday's decision by Greek citizens, there is no basis to enter into negotiations on a new aid program," German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
Regarding requests by Athens to restructure its debt, finance ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said: "I can see no reason to enter into discussions."
Well, when your negotiating partner essentially says....
....there usually isn't anything left to talk about. Other than to rub the Greeks' noses in the fact that they need the E.U. a helluva lot more than the E.U. needs Greece. A reality that will become abundantly clear over the next days, weeks, and months, although I have no doubt that the Greeks can stick their fingers deep enough in their ears and keep humming loudly enough to tune it out. At least until they can no longer afford air.
The one other thing the Germans did say is guaranteed to drive Athens even more batbleep:
Greece’s creditors turned up the heat on Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to come up with a plan to stay in the euro, as banknotes become more scarce and the nation stares at an economic calamity....
“Time is running out and the window for a deal keeps narrowing,” Mujtaba Rahman, head of the Europe practice at Eurasia Group in London, wrote in a note to clients. “The euro leaders’ summit on Tuesday is likely to prove decisive for Greece’s euro membership.”
"Prove to us that you're cleaning up your own mess" - i.e. self-imposed "austerity" - "and we can talk. Otherwise, Greece is persona non gratta," Maybe, just maybe, if the E.U. had taken this eminently sensible "tough love" approach from the beginning five years ago, this debacle might, just might, have been averted. Certainly switching finance ministers (Yanis Varoufakis out, Euclid Tsakalotos in), which strikes me as being the same sort of bad-cop-for-good cop gimmick as the mullahs rotating out Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Hassan Rouhani, isn't impressing anybody in Brussels.
Nor, as I predicted, is the Greek default causing global financial markets more than a glance and a yawn:
Financial markets were more sanguine about Greece’s fate. The euro was down 0.4% to $1.1069 at 4:40 p.m. in London. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index fell 1.2%, compared with a drop of as much as 3.2% a week ago when Tsipras introduced capital controls and closed banks.
The Greek government, in short, has zero leverage. Their leaving the euro and the E.U. itself won't matter one jot or tittle to the latter, and would, as I've been arguing, be a net benefit by unloading that burden off of their fiscal plate. And really, after the Balkans turmoil dating back twenty-five years, what difference would one more failed state in southeast Europe make?
Both sides are about to find out the answer to that question. And it's one that the Tsipras regime and three out of every five Greeks are very unlikely to like.
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