Greece Tugs at Euro's Heartstrings Amid Economic Case for Exit - Bloomberg
No one quite knows how a Grexit would be engineered, but the case for it runs like this: with 11 million people, Greece represents 3. 2 percent of the population and 1. 8 percent of the output of the 19-nation euro zone’s 10. 1 trillion-euro ($11... By that score, the European economy is only a bit more exposed to Greece than the U. S. is to Puerto Rico, now wracked by a debt crisis that hasn’t exactly rattled confidence in the dollar. Cut Greece loose, and the euro region would remain the world’s second-largest economy, happily exporting Mercedes and BMW cars from Germany and Louis Vuitton handbags from France. The euro’s role as a symbol of European unity has always sat uneasily alongside its more mundane function as a unit of account. Greece’s admission to the currency in 2001 was an act of statesmanship, as were its first two bailouts in 2010-12. The question now is whether the sheer weight of its economic afflictions blunts the political imperatives for keeping the euro zone... “People might think if Greece leaves the euro why won’t it be another country that abandons it in the future,” Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told Cadena Cope radio on Tuesday, underlining the currency’s status as the continent’s political... Source: www.bloomberg.com
