Currently there are a number of weak spots in the global financial edifice, in addition to the perennial problem children Argentina and Venezuela (we will take a closer look at these two next week in a separate post).
There is on the one hand Greece, where an election victory of Syria seems highly likely. We recently reported on the “Mexican standoff” between the EU and Alexis Tsipras. We want to point readers to some additional background information presented in an article assessing the political risk posed by Syriza that has recently appeared at the Brookings Institute. The article was written by Theodore Pelagidis, an observer who is close to the action in Greece.
As Mr. Pelagidis notes, one should not make the mistake of underestimating the probability that Syriza will end up opting for default and a unilateral exit from the euro zone – since Mr. Tsipras may well prefer that option over political suicide.
Note by the way that the ECB has just begun to put pressure on Greek politicians by warning it will cut off funding to Greek banks unless the final bailout review in February is successfully concluded (i.e., to the troika's satisfaction). The stakes for Greece are obviously quite high. There are two ways of looking at this: either the ECB provides an excuse for Syriza, which can now claim that it is essentially blackmailed into agreeing to the bailout conditions “for the time being”, or Mr. Tsipras and his colleagues may be enraged by what they will likely see as a blatant attempt at usurping what is left of Greek sovereignty, and by implication, their power.
We have already discussed Russia's situation in some detail in recent weeks (see for instance “Will There Be Forced Official Sellers of Gold”). As regards Ukraine, its economy is already doing what observers are merely expecting to happen with Russia's economy in light of the recent decline in crude oil prices. In other words, It is no exaggeration to state that Ukraine's economy is in total free-fall. The country's foreign exchange reserves have declined precipitously, most of the central bank's gold has been mysteriously “vaporized”, and what is left of it has turned out to be painted lead (no kidding, the central bank's vault in Odessa was found to contain painted lead bars instead of gold bars – the thieves didn't even bother with using tungsten).
