Hugo Dixon

Odysseus would recognise the dilemma faced by today’s Greeks as they must choose either the pain of sticking with the euro or the chaos of bringing back the drachma. The Homeric hero had to steer his ship between the six-headed sea monster, Scylla, and the whirlpool, Charybdis. Avoiding both was impossible. Odysseus chose the sea monster, each of whose heads gobbled up a member of his crew. He judged it was not as bad as having the whole ship sucked into the whirlpool.

As Greece heads to the polls on June 17 for the second time in just over a month, none of the options it faces are attractive. The economy has shrunk about 15 percent from its 2008 peak, unemployment stands at 22 percent and further austerity and reform are required as part of the euro zone/IMF bailout. But the lesser of two evils is staying the course.

Some of this misery was inevitable. Greece’s current account and fiscal deficits each reached around 15 percent of GDP in 2008 and 2009, and had to be cut. But successive Greek governments have managed to make the situation worse than it needed to be.

When Odysseus had to pass by the sea monster, he told his crew to row as fast as possible and not stop. That way, each of Scylla’s heads only had time to munch one man.

By contrast, today’s Greeks have dawdled. Confidence in the country and its political class is shot to bits, both at home and abroad. Capital is fleeing, investment has vanished and tax-dodging has become even worse than it was – which is saying a lot. The government isn’t paying its bills, nor are many companies. As a result, Scylla keeps gobbling up more men.

Terrible as things are, the current situation is not hopeless. The budget deficit, before interest payments, declined by 9 percentage points of GDP in 2010-2011. The economy is also getting more competitive: unit labour costs, which shot up vis-a-vis Greece’s euro zone partners in the first decade of the single currency, had by the end of last year recouped half the lost ground. They will have fallen further since the minimum wage was slashed earlier this year.

What is now needed is a strong government. It should embark on three main tasks. First, continue the reform programme, and get serious at last on fighting tax evasion. Second, negotiate with the euro zone/IMF a longer period to eliminate its budget deficit and secure investment to boost short-term growth. Third, negotiate another debt reduction plan.

If such a government were formed, confidence could gradually return and the economy could stop shrinking. The experience of the Baltic countries – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – shows such reforms can work. After the credit crunch crisis, GDP in the three countries fell by between 15 and 21 percent but has since partly recovered.

But wouldn’t going back to the drachma be better? Some commentators point to countries like Iceland, which restored its competitiveness by a massive devaluation following the credit crunch and only suffered an 11 percent fall in GDP. Wouldn’t devaluation be a quicker and less painful way for Greece to get back in shape?

The answer is no – for two reasons. First, the dislocation caused by bringing in a new currency would be much more severe than devaluing a currency that already exists. The banks would temporarily run out of cash and there would be multiple legal disputes over who owes what, which could gum up the economy for years.

Second, Greece is receiving an extraordinary amount of cheap money as part of its second bailout plan: 130 billion euros, or 88 percent of GDP. This gives it time to cut its twin deficits. If Athens left the euro, it would be lucky to get a fraction of that cash. The country would then have to balance its books immediately.

An even harsher fiscal squeeze would exacerbate the vicious spiral. The alternative would be to print drachmas to fill the hole in the budget. But such monetary financing would lead to rapidly rising inflation, which would already have been given a boost by the devaluation. Lucas Papademos, the country’s former technocratic prime minister, predicted last week that inflation could reach 30-50 percent in such a scenario.

Meanwhile, Greece is hugely dependent on imports not just for final consumption but also to keep its economy going. It imports oil, medicine, food. If it had to slash imports suddenly, industry would grind to a halt. Even tourism, the mainstay of its economy, which accounts for 16.5 percent of GDP, could suffer if hotels promising a five-star experience delivered a three-star one. GDP might fall another 20 percent, according to Papademos.

Social unrest would worsen, with street battles, attacks on immigrants, vigilante law enforcement and major strikes. That would further deter the tourists. It would also make it harder to put together a sensible government. The field would be open for populists and extremists. This way leads to Charybdis.

To avoid this menace, the electorate will need to give a strong leader the mandate to pursue the current course more vigorously. Unfortunately, neither of the front runners in next Sunday’s election – conservative Antonis Samaras and radical leftist Alexis Tsipras – is a modern-day Odysseus. And neither looks able to secure a decisive win. Unless a third election can produce a better outcome, the drachma will probably return, and the Greeks will get sucked into the whirlpool.

Greece needs to go to the brink. Only then will the people back a government that can pursue the tough programme needed to turn the country around. To get to that point, bailout cash for both the government and the banks probably has to be turned off.

It might be thought that the country is already on the edge of the abyss. This month’s election savaged the two traditional ruling parties which were backing the bailout plan that is keeping the country afloat. Extremists of both right and left gained strength – voters liked their opposition to the plan. But nobody could form a government. Hence, there will be a second election on June 17.

Will this second election express the Greeks’ desire clearly: stick with the programme and stay in the euro; or tear up the plan and bring back the drachma? That is how Greece’s financial backers in the rest of the euro zone, such as Germany, are trying to frame the debate. But the electorate doesn’t yet see the choice as that stark. Roughly three quarters want to stay with the euro but two thirds don’t want the reform-plus-austerity programme.

The next election is unlikely to resolve this inconsistency – or at least that is the conclusion I came to from a trip to Athens last week. The battle for first place is between Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of the radical left SYRIZA party, and the centre-right New Democracy party led by Antonis Samaras.

A victory for Samaras might seem to offer the hope that Greece will stick with the programme and the euro. He has, after all, campaigned for both. However, even if he comes first – which he did in this month’s election – he will not have a parliamentary majority. He will either have to stitch together a majority coalition or govern a minority government. Neither is the recipe for a strong government.

A Samaras government could theoretically deliver a positive shock by moving full-steam ahead on reforms and gaining so much credibility with Greece’s euro zone partners that they give Athens real help in turning around the country. But it is far more likely that he will be timid and the rest of the euro zone will throw Greece only a few crumbs. The economy, which has gone from bad to worse in the last couple of months of electioneering paralysis, would continue its nosedive, Samaras’ popularity would evaporate and after a few months his government would collapse.

A victory by Tsipras in next month’s election might seem even worse. After all, he will probably set Athens on a collision course with the rest of the euro zone. Last week Tsipras likened the relationship between Greece and the euro zone to that between Russia and America in the Cold War, when both had nuclear weapons that could destroy the other but refrained from firing them. Tsipras thinks the rest of the euro zone is scared that Greece’s return to the drachma would cause the entire single currency to unravel and that the bail out of Athens will continue, even without substantial economic reform.

The impact on the euro zone of Greece’s expulsion would undoubtedly be severe. But the other countries are finally preparing contingency plans to mitigate the damage. Germany, for one, will not be blackmailed by threats of mutually assured destruction.

It is conceivable that Tsipras will blink first, if he wins the election and finds he can’t shift the Germans. But this is unlikely. The typical weasel words of a politician won’t be enough to get him out of a tight spot; he would have to perform a complete somersault. It is doubtful the Marxists in his party would let him get away with this and, if they did, he would certainly lose all credibility in the country.

That said, a victory for Tsipras may paradoxically be Greece’s best chance of staying in the euro because it would bring things to a head rapidly. The country is being kept alive by a dual life-support system: the euro zone and IMF are channelling cash to the government, while the European Central Bank is authorising cash transfers to the banks. If the first tap is turned off, the government will not be able to pay salaries and pensions from July. If the second tap is turned off, the banks could run out of cash within days.

Cutting off Greece’s life support could be the trigger for reintroducing the drachma as the people found the cash machines ran dry. But it could also finally force the people to decide whether they were prepared to back reform – provided the euro zone simultaneously rolled out a proper plan to help the country. A key element of that would have to be to take over the Greek banks and guarantee their deposits, putting the country into a form of financial protectorate.

In such a scenario, a Tsipras government would probably collapse. After all, even if he comes first in the next election, he will not have a majority and so would be relying on coalition partners or governing in a minority. Greece would then need a third election, after which it might be able to put together a national unity government – perhaps even led by Lucas Papademos, the technocrat who ran the country for the last six months.

It is a slim chance full of risks, but probably Greece’s best chance of avoiding the drachma.

When euro zone policymakers are asked if there is a Plan B to cope with a Greek exit from the single currency, their typical answer goes something like this: “There’s no such plan. If there were, it would leak, investors would panic and the exit scenario would gather unstoppable momentum.”

Maybe there really is no plan. Or maybe policymakers are just doing a good job of keeping their mouths shut. Hopefully, it is the latter because, since Greece’s election, the chances of Athens quitting the euro have shot up. And unless the rest of the euro zone is well prepared, the knock-on effect will be devastating.

The Greeks have lost their stomach for austerity and the rest of the euro zone has lost its patience with Athens’ broken promises. But unless one side blinks, Greece will be out of the single currency and any deposits left in Greek banks will be converted from euros into cut-price drachmas.

People outside Greece may think this is simply a Greek problem. Would it really be much worse than Athens’ debt restructuring earlier this year which passed off with barely a murmur? But the process of bringing back the drachma is likely to involve temporarily shutting banks and imposing capital controls. That would set a frightening precedent.

Politicians and central bankers would, of course, argue that Greece was a not a precedent but a one-off. But why trust them? When Greece was first bailed out in 2010, policymakers said it was a special case. Then Ireland and Portugal required official bailouts while both Spain and Italy have had to be helped by the European Central Bank. If savers in Greece get hammered, depositors and investors in these other weak euro member would want to move their money to somewhere safer. Fears would rise of a complete break-up of the euro zone.

Indeed, there already has been significant capital flight from peripheral economies. The best way of seeing this is by looking at so-called Target 2 imbalances – the amount of money that national central banks in the euro zone owe to the ECB or are owed by it. These imbalances are a rough proxy for capital flight.

Four euro zone central banks – in Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Finland – have positive balances. At the end of April, the Bundesbank was owed 644 billion euros, according to data collected by Germany’s Ifo Institute. The sum has been rising by an average of 33 billion euros a month since the crisis took a turn for the worse at the end of July last year. Meanwhile, all the peripheral countries have big liabilities. Italy and Spain have the largest with 279 billion euros (as of April) and 276 billion euros (as of March) respectively.

A Greek exit from the euro would, at least temporarily, accelerate capital flight. Measures would need to be taken to counteract it – to protect both depositors and governments in vulnerable countries.

Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to construct a contingency plan. To protect depositors, the ECB would have to make clear that a limitless supply of liquidity with very few strings attached was available for banks across the euro zone. This would avoid the possibility that savers would find they couldn’t get money out of their accounts. After a while, calm might return.

To protect governments, the ECB would also need to wade into action. Although it cannot lend to states directly, it can buy their bonds on the secondary market. Indeed, it has already done so. It would, though, need to be prepared to buy bonds in limitless quantities. Otherwise, investors might just run anyway and take the ECB’s money while it lasted.

Although the ECB would have to play the main role in preventing a panic, the euro zone’s so-called firewall should play a subsidiary role. The region will soon have two main bailout funds – the existing European Financial Stability Facility and the European Stability Mechanism. These could be deployed in two ways.

First, they could provide a backstop to national deposit guarantee funds. That way, an Italian saver would know that, if Rome’s own guarantee scheme ran out of money, there were funds in another kitty to fill the hole. Second, the bailout funds could lend cash directly to governments that were no longer able to issue bonds in the markets.

However, the bailout funds are not large enough to stem a panic on their own. They only have 740 billion euros available. Even with help from the International Monetary Fund, they would not be able to douse the flames.

Although it is fairly easy to think of a plan B, that doesn’t mean it would be easy to get political agreement for it from Germany and the other creditor countries. One concern would be that the ECB would be taking huge financial risks by buying government bonds and lending to banks. Another is that such rescues, which would amount to a big step towards fiscal union, would take the pressure off the peripheral governments and their banks to reform themselves and improve their solvency.

On the other hand, failure to act as a lender of last resort in a Greek-exit panic could trigger a domino effect of bankruptcies – of banks and governments – throughout the periphery. The euro couldn’t survive that.

Germany may soon need to decide between going all-in to save the single currency or witnessing its destruction.

Investors are feeling more optimistic about the euro crisis. So are policymakers. That much was evident last week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. There was much satisfaction over the early performance of the Super Mario Brothers – Mario Draghi, president of the European Central bank, and Mario Monti, Italy’s prime minister. What’s more, a deal may be in the works to build a bigger firewall against contagion, constructed out of commitments from euro zone members and the International Monetary Fund. And it looks like there will be another short-term fix for Greece.

But three bad fairies were lurking at the Davos feast. Spain and France are relatively new problems and Greece is an old one. All three are powerful menaces.

Madrid is staring at a particularly vicious version of the austerity spiral afflicting most of the euro zone. The last government missed its fiscal targets, leaving the country with a budget deficit of 8 percent of GDP in 2011. The programme agreed with the European Union commits Spain to cutting this to 4.4 percent in 2012. Doing so would be hard in good times. Trying to reach this target when GDP is set to shrink by at least 1.5 percent and the unemployment rate is already 23 percent would be nearly suicidal.

Mariano Rajoy’s new conservative government is making a lot of the right noises. It is steeling itself for a long overdue overhaul of the labour market. It is also preparing to clean up its banks’ toxic balance sheets. But requiring it simultaneously to throttle the economy with such a severe squeeze would set it up to fail.

There’s an obvious trade-off: in return for going full steam ahead with the structural reforms, Madrid could be allowed a little longer to get its deficit under control. Such a deal could be applied to other countries too. But it would require Germany’s blessing – and that doesn’t yet appear to be forthcoming.

Now look at France. The majority of voters there have not grasped the need to reshape the welfare state to make it affordable. Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of reform at the beginning of his five-year presidential term, but did little more than push up the state pension age from 60 to 62 – which is still inadequate – and even that provoked howls of protest.

In his re-election campaign, Sarkozy is belatedly promising more changes, such as a shift in taxes from labour to consumption. While these could boost competitiveness, the incumbent is lagging in the polls for the April ballot. His leading rival, the socialist Francois Hollande, has suggested weakening the few reforms Sarkozy managed to enact. A rise in bond yields may be needed to shock the French out of their reverie.

Finally, don’t forget Greece. Even before the deal to restructure its debts has been inked, attention has turned back to Athens’ record as a serial breaker of promises. Given that up to 90 billion euros is supposed to be handed over to Greece in the next bumper bailout payment, it’s hardly surprising that some politicians in Germany are ratcheting up the pressure to make the country keep its side of the bargain.

The latest proposal doing the rounds in Berlin is for a virtual economic protectorate over Greece, an EU budget commissioner who could overrule the decisions of the Greek government and parliament on taxes and spending. This reduction of sovereignty has already provoked an angry response from the Greeks. But something clearly needs to be done to get the country on track. If the politicians in Athens are unwilling to accept help from abroad in running the machinery of government, Greece really will find itself squeezed out of the euro.

A compromise may resolve the latest Greek standoff, just as ways may be found for Spain to avoid an austerity spiral and for the French to recognise the need for reform. But solving the euro crisis is like running a marathon with hurdles. Each hurdle may in itself be possible to jump, but the race isn’t over and the runners are getting tired.

Watch Athens more than Standard & Poor’s. The biggest source of immediate trouble for the euro zone could be the one country the ratings agency didn’t examine in a review that led to the downgrade of France and eight other states. Even if the short-term shoals can be navigated, the rest of the zone won’t find it easy to get by Greece.

The points S&P made when stripping France and Austria of their triple-A ratings and knocking two notches off the ratings of the likes of Italy and Spain were valid. It is true, for example, that policymakers can’t agree what to do to solve the euro crisis and that “fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating.” But these points, as well as the prospect of S&P downgrades, were already in the market.

Meanwhile, what Mario Draghi said last week about “tentative signs of stabilization” is true. The European Central Bank (ECB), over which Draghi presides, is itself partly responsible for that stabilization by virtue of providing 489 billion euros of three-year money to banks just before Christmas. Mario Monti’s promising beginning as Italy’s prime minister is the other main factor. The Super Mario Brothers have got off to a good start.

In Greece, though, matters go from bad to worse. The economy, which shrank about 6 percent last year, is now forecast to shrink an additional 4 percent or so by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs –- even worse than the International Monetary Fund forecast in November. What this means is that the numbers behind the latest bailout plan-cum-debt restructuring are probably out of date.

The immediate problem is corralling private-sector bondholders to swap 206 billion euros of bonds for new paper nominally worth half that value. There are actually two problems: persuading the negotiators for the bondholders to accept a deal and then getting virtually all the bondholders themselves to agree.

Despite the brinkmanship, which led the negotiators to leave the talks on Friday, it is likely there will be a solution — albeit a messy one. If the negotiators eventually agree, recalcitrant bondholders can be roped in by retroactively inserting collective action clauses in their contracts. If the negotiators don’t agree, there can be a formal default with losses imposed on everybody by diktat.

The snag is that restructuring the private-sector debt wouldn’t remotely close the Greek dossier as far as the rest of the euro zone is concerned. The question would then be whether to provide Athens with a bumper 90 billion euro tranche of bailout cash in March. The previous tranches have been much smaller: December’s, for example, was only 8 billion euros. But the debt restructuring means the next tranche has to be supersized: Up to 40 billion euros is required to recapitalize the country’s banks, whose balance sheets will be shot to bits because they are up to their gills in their own government’s bonds; a further 30 billion euros is needed as a sweetener to persuade the private bondholders to agree to the restructuring.

Politicians elsewhere will not find it easy to write the Greeks such a mega-check. There was much wrangling even before the previous smaller tranches, given that Athens’ finances were always worse than expected and that the country was never delivering on its promises. This time not only is serious money at stake but there will soon be an election that could bring in Antonis Samaras, the mercurial leader of the country’s conservative New Democracy party, as prime minister. He has been reluctant to embrace the austerity-cum-reform program that the euro zone and IMF want the country to follow.

Lending Greece such a huge sum when it’s not on track and is about to have an election would be risky. But the alternative would be for the whole program to fall to pieces. And despite the recent signs of stabilization that Draghi spoke of, other euro zone countries aren’t yet ready for an uncontrolled Greek default. So the best bet is that they will hold their noses, fudge things and hand over the money.

But that wouldn’t be the end of the trouble either. The continual bailouts mean that the public sector will soon have about 300 billion euros at stake in Greece. This is made up of loans by euro zone countries, loans from the IMF, purchases of Greek bonds by the ECB, loans by the ECB to Greek banks and permission given by the ECB to the Greek central bank to lend yet more money to its own banks.

The rest of the euro zone hasn’t been willing to see Greece default on its debts or leave the single currency because it has been worried about contagion. In future, the risk of contagion may be reduced. After all, if the current debt restructuring is successfully concluded, there will be less private-sector exposure to Greece, and so any second debt restructuring might cause less of an earthquake.

But even if the risk of contagion is smaller, the euro zone wouldn’t be able to wave good-bye to Greece. After all, the flip side of less private-sector exposure will be that vast 300 billion-euro public-sector exposure. Politicians -– such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, who faces an election in autumn 2013 –- won’t want to explain massive losses to their electorates.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder to the top of the hill, only to see it roll all the way down again. It looks as if the euro zone will be carrying its Sisyphean burden for a long time.

When confidence in a regime’s permanence is shaken, it can collapse rapidly. The fear or hope of change alters people’s behavior in ways which make that change more likely. This applies to both political regimes such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and economic regimes such as the euro.

Fear that the single currency may break up now risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Banks and investors are beginning to act as if the single currency might fall apart. Politicians and the European Central Bank need to restore belief that the single currency is here to stay. Otherwise, it could unravel pretty fast.

Until a few weeks ago, the idea that the euro wouldn’t survive the current debt crisis was a fringe view. Since the euro summit on Oct. 26-27, it has become a mainstream scenario. So much so that last week risk premiums on the bonds of even triple-A rated countries such as France and Austria rose to record levels, while Spain became the latest country to be sucked into the danger zone.

The summit itself made two technical decisions which have had damaging, unintended consequences. First, banks underwent a stress test that marked their sovereign bond exposures to market whereas previously regulators maintained the fiction that these positions were risk-free. This meant that lenders suddenly had to start holding capital to back their sovereign debt investments. Not surprisingly, they have become more reluctant to buy bonds. This, in turn, has made it harder for governments to fund themselves.

Second, the summit decided to strong-arm the banks into agreeing to a “voluntary” debt restructuring for Greece. Because the deal is supposedly voluntary, credit default swaps (CDS) – a type of insurance policy that pays out if an entity goes bust – won’t be triggered. This arm-twisting has convinced lenders that CDSs are a useless way of hedging the risk of investing in euro zone government bonds. Without a hedge, many prefer not to hold the bonds at all – again making it harder for states to fund themselves.

After the summit, things went from bad to worse with Greece’s disastrous plan to call a referendum on its latest bailout plan. That idea was withdrawn – but not before Germany and France suggested that Athens might need to be kicked out of the euro unless it came to heel. The snag is that it would be very hard to isolate the Greeks. If one country could leave the single currency, why not two, three or all 17?

As investors thought about the possibility of a euro break-up, they started factoring in currency risk. Under such a scenario, the new Greek drachma would plummet in value; the new Italian lira and Spanish peseta would also take a tumble; even the new French franc would depreciate versus a vibrant new Deutsche Mark. That gave the market another reason to sell pretty much every non-German government bond – again making it harder for those states to fund themselves.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, banks are also suffering from a liquidity squeeze. It’s not just investors who are getting jittery about putting their money in banks; lenders are reluctant to lend to each other because they are not totally sure that their peers will survive.

Banks outside the euro zone are also cutting their lines of credit to those inside the zone. The big four UK banks cut interbank loans by around a quarter in the three months to end September, according to data compiled by the Financial Times. Meanwhile, the United States is about to embark on a new stress tests of its lenders. This will include contingency planning against further disruptions in Europe. It wouldn’t be surprising if this provoked American banks to cut their exposure to their euro counterparts, further exacerbating their funding problems.

These vicious spirals have drowned out the good news on the political front. Italy, Greece and now Spain have new prime ministers, all of whom seem intent on cutting debts and making their economies fitter. But they will struggle to reduce their borrowing costs unless investors can be convinced that the euro is here to stay.

The one thing that probably would restore confidence is if the ECB found some way of supporting governments that were pursuing sensible policies. But the central bank itself and Germany, the euro zone’s main paymaster, have so far resisted this. In part, this is because they think governments won’t have a strong incentive to reform if they are bailed out too easily.

The logic of making countries sweat so that they address problems they have shirked for years, and sometimes decades, is a good one. But the ECB and Germany should remember that carrots are useful incentives, as well as sticks – and, if they don’t provide the carrot soon, the euro may not survive.

Chaos, drama and crisis are all Greek words. So is catharsis. Europe is perched between chaos and catharsis, as the political dramas in Athens and Rome reach crisis point. One path leads to destruction; the other rebirth. Though there are signs of hope, a few more missteps will lead down into the chasm.

The dramas in the two cradles of European civilization are similar and, in bizarre ways, linked. Last week’s decision by George Papandreou to call a referendum on whether the Greeks were in favor of the country’s latest bailout program set off a chain reaction that is bringing down not only his government but probably that of Silvio Berlusconi too.

The mad referendum plan, which has now been rescinded, shocked Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy so much that they threatened to cut off funding to Greece unless it got its act together — a move that would drive it out of the euro. But this is probably an empty threat, at least in the short term, because of the way that Athens is roped to Rome. If Greece is pushed over the edge, Italy could be dragged over too and then the whole single currency would collapse. So, ironically, Athens is being saved from the immediate consequences of its delinquency by the fear of a much bigger disaster across the Ionian Sea.

Italian bond yields, which were already uncomfortably high, shot up after the Greek referendum fiasco. Berlusconi was forced to pacify Merkel and Sarkozy at the G20 meeting in Cannes by agreeing to a parliamentary confidence vote on his government’s lackluster reform program as well as to monitoring by the International Monetary Fund. The humiliation in Cannes, where Berlusconi’s finance minister pointedly failed to back him, could be the final nail in the PM’s coffin.

The end of the Berlusconi and Papandreou eras should, in theory, be a cause for celebration. Although the Italian PM’s behavior has been scandalous, whereas the Greek PM’s has not been, they have both led their countries deeper into debt. They are also both members of political castes that have enfeebled their nations for many years. Getting rid of them could be the start of a renewal process.

The snag is that it’s not certain that what comes next will be better. In both countries, where I have spent much of the last fortnight, the best outcome would be national unity governments committed to rooting out corruption and cutting back overgenerous welfare states. This could happen either before or after snap elections. Unfortunately, the old political castes die hard. They could continue bickering over who suffers the most pain and who gets the top jobs until they are staring into the abyss — or even fall in.

Many in the rest of Europe, meanwhile, would probably love to push them over the edge if they were themselves strong enough to take the strain. But Merkel, Sarkozy et al have been criminal in their lack of preparation. The so-called comprehensive plan agreed to at the euro summit of Oct. 26 was another case of too little, too late. Not only was the plan for recapitalizing Europe’s banks only about half as big as it should have been as well as foolishly delayed until next June; the scheme for leveraging up the region’s safety net, the European Financial Stability Facility, is full of holes. This became clear at Cannes, where Merkel had to admit that few other G20 countries wanted to invest in it.

The whole of Europe is now in a race against time. The Greeks have to get their act together before the rest of Europe is ready to cut them loose. The Italians have to restore credibility before they get sucked into a vortex from which they can’t escape. And the rest need to put in place really strong contingency plans in case Athens and Rome continue to let them down. If everybody runs very fast, the last week could be the beginning of the catharsis. If not, chaos beckons.

The euro zone is like Hotel California, UBS wrote in a report published in September. “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave,” it said, quoting the Eagles song. A British businessman, Simon Wolfson, has now offered a 250,000 pound prize to the person who can come up with the most convincing explanation of how an orderly exit from the single currency is possible.

The problem is the word “orderly.” There are lots of scenarios where a country such as Greece could quit the euro in a disorderly fashion, destroying its own economy and that of its neighbous as well as possibly plunging the world into a recession. But how is it possible to do this without triggering financial Armageddon?

The first difficulty stems from the fact that an exit couldn’t happen overnight. There is no legal procedure for a country to quit. Joining was supposed to be an irrevocable commitment.

Treaties can, of course, be renegotiated or broken. But this couldn’t happen rapidly -– or, more to the point, secretly. There are 17 members of the euro zone; and another 10 European Union members such as the United Kingdom, which don’t use the single currency. If Greece wanted to reintroduce the drachma, it would have to secure the unanimous agreement of these other nations. It is also inconceivable that it could take such a momentous decision without discussing it in parliament. Predict weeks, if not months, of heated wrangling.

Such debate would frighten the horses. Many depositors have already removed their savings from Greek banks. An open discussion about Athens leaving the euro would trigger a stampede. The whole point of bringing back the drachma would be to devalue it in the hope of making Greek industry competitive. Analysts think the initial fall might be 50 percent. If so, anybody patriotic enough to keep their money in a Greek bank would lose half their savings.

Transitional mayhem
Athens could then do three things: allow its banks to collapse; appeal to its euro partners for help; or impose controls on how much money people could take out of its banks.

Allowing banks to collapse in a disorderly fashion would be mad. It would be a sure-fire way to cause economic chaos and social disorder. The recent street protests would seem like a tea party.

Getting help from the euro zone would be ideal. But why would its euro partners want to bail out Greece’s banks, if the country was on the point of quitting the euro? The European Central Bank has already stopped making new loans directly to some Greek banks because they have run out of high-quality collateral. Instead, it has authorised the Greek central bank to provide liquidity, with Athens theoretically on the hook for any losses. But if Greece was about to quit the euro, the ECB would be worried that it would never get paid back. It would hardly want to authorize yet more lending as this could just increase the size of its future losses.

So Athens’ only choice would be to control how much people could take out of their accounts. It would be like wartime –- with savings rationed instead of butter and bread. This wouldn’t be as bad as allowing banks to collapse. But it would still plunge the country deeper into misery.

Brave new economy
The hope, of course, would be that Greece would eventually rebound on the back of a super-competitive drachma. Northern Europeans would flock to its beaches to enjoy half-price retsina and feta. Maybe. But there would be two other questions: how would the government finance itself; and how would inflation be contained?

Athens has too much debt. The latest forecast from the Troika (made up of the International Monetary Fund, the ECB and the European Commission) is that debt will reach 183 percent of GDP by the end of next year. That debt load will loom even bigger if Greece quit the euro. In drachma terms, assuming again a 50 percent devaluation, debt would rocket to 366 percent of GDP. The government has to default even if it stays in the euro; but the extent of the haircut would be bigger if it quits.

Greece also has a primary budget deficit: it is earning less than it spends even before interest payments. A unilateral default would make it a pariah state. Nobody would lend it money to finance its ongoing deficits. That would provoke an even more severe recession in the short run. The government would also be tempted to print lots of new drachmas to fill the hole in its coffers, fueling inflation and debasing the currency.

To avoid such a nightmare scenario, Greece would need to secure an orderly default if it quit the euro. The best hope of achieving that would be to cut a new agreement with the IMF. Most but not all of its debts would be cancelled. But it would have to agree to tight fiscal and monetary policies to make sure it didn’t run up new debts or descend into hyperinflation. In return, it would get some hard currency to manage the transition. But even with such a balm, the journey would be painful.

Vicious contagion
Unfortunately, the problems with a Greek exit from the euro would not stop with Greece. Contagion would be far more virulent than anything witnessed so far.

Seeing what was happening to Greek depositors, savers in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy — and possibly even France and other countries — would run a mile. They would take their euros and deposit them in German, Dutch or Finnish banks. To stop a large chunk of Europe’s banking system collapsing, the ECB would have to authorise unlimited supplies of liquidity for an indefinite period of time.

The key decision would be whether to let any other countries go the way of Greece. Portugal would be seen as next in line because of its need to improve competitiveness. But Lisbon would probably not want to quit. Given that there’s no time to waste in the midst of a bank run, the least bad option would be to rally around all the remaining euro countries and insist they were permanent members of the club.

It might, though, be sensible to take the opportunity of a Greek exit from the euro to arrange simultaneously an orderly default of Portugal and perhaps Ireland while keeping them in the single currency. If their debt levels were cut to more sustainable levels, they would be in a better shape to withstand the whirlwind unleashed by Athens’ departure.

Wherever the line was drawn, it would have to be defended to the hilt. This wouldn’t just be about protecting depositors. Bond investors would believe more departures from the single currency were on their way. Portugal and Ireland don’t matter for the time being because they are supported by euro zone and IMF bailout programmes which don’t require them to tap the market for new money. But Italy and Spain, which are already suffering jitters, would be shut out of the market.

The convulsions from a bankruptcy of Italy, whose debt is nearly 2 trillion euros, would be so seismic that it shouldn’t be attempted unless there really is no alternative. But rescues by other governments wouldn’t be possible either. The region’s bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, isn’t remotely big enough.

Financial jiggery-pokery — such as turning the EFSF into an insurance company to leverage its firepower — might just work in the current circumstances. But it wouldn’t have credibility if Greece was quitting the euro and there were bank runs across the continent. The best way to hold the line would be for the ECB to provide unlimited supplies of liquidity to struggling nations by massively expanding its purchases of Italian, Spanish and other sovereign bonds in the secondary market.

The good thing about the ECB is that there is theoretically no ceiling on how many euros it can print. The problem is that massive liquidity injections to both banks and governments could remove the incentive for lenders and countries to manage their affairs wisely. Once the storm had passed, it would be best to separate the illiquid institutions or governments from the insolvent ones and find a way of restructuring the debts of the latter in an orderly fashion.

But faced with the choice between an imploding euro zone or underwriting delinquency, the ECB would be best advised at least initially to plump for the latter even if that would involve eating its words. Still, there’s no disguising that it would be an unpleasant outcome.

An orderly exit from the euro is a virtual oxymoron. There are ways to minimize the damage –- principally by rationing access to savings during the transition, orchestrating an orderly default of the country that quits and unleashing the ECB as a lender of last resort to those that remain. Even with such a program, the economic damage would be huge. Without it, staying in Hotel California would seem like a holiday. The euro zone would become a towering inferno with everybody scrambling for the exits.

PHOTO: A banner featuring a Euro coin is seen on the European Commission headquarters building ahead of a European Union heads of state summit in Brussels October 26, 2011. REUTERS/Yves Herman