The Greek End Game?

GREECE END GAME?

If this article from Zerohedge is true (and why shouldn't it be?) then it would certainly seem so.

--- Alexander Mercouris

Greece Effectively Defaults To IMF Using SDR Reserves To "Repay" Fund; 1 Month Countdown Begins

Zero Hedge,

12 May, 2015

When Monday’s Eurogroup meeting concluded without an agreement between Greece and its creditors, it should have been game over for Athens. With pensioners at their breaking point and with local governments reluctant to comply with a decree mandating a sweep of excess cash reserves, the idea that Greece would somehow be able to scrape together €750 million euros to make a scheduled payment to the IMF today seemed far-fetched at best which is why we asked the following question Monday afternoon:

Where, if not from local governments who have been extremely reluctant to comply with Athens' cash sweep decree, and if not from the IMF which will apparently not be paying itself tomorrow after all, is Greece going to get three quarters of a billion euros in the next 12 hours?

We now know the answer to that question. As Bloomberg reports, citing Kathimerini, Greece tapped IMF reserves to pay .. well, to pay the IMF:

Greece used up ~EU650m reserves from its SDR IMF holdings account to meet loan payment of ~EU750m due to Fund today, Kathimerini newspaper reports, without citing anyone.

Reserves kept in IMF holdings account need to be replenished within one month

IMF agreed over weekend for their use, given Greece’s liquidity situation; without use of those reserves, payment due today wouldn’t be possible.

Reuters has a bit more color:

Greece tapped emergency reserves in its holding account at the International Monetary Fund to make a crucial 750 million euro (539 million pounds) debt payment to the Fund on Monday, two government officials said on Tuesday.

With Athens close to running out of cash and a deal with its international creditors still elusive, there had been doubts whether the leftist-led government would pay the IMF or opt to save cash to pay salaries and pensions later this month.

Member countries of the IMF have two accounts at the fund - one where their annual quotas are deposited and a holding account which may be used for emergencies.

One official told Reuters that Athens used about 650 million euros from the holding account to make the payment.

"We made use of money in our holding account in the fund," the official said, declining to be named. "The government also used about 100 million of its cash reserves."

This explains why Yanis Varoufakis was so confident that the payment would be made and also why the language around the payment confirmation was so bizarre (recall that the heading was "Greece said to have given order for IMF repayment"). It also underscores the degree to which this entire ordeal has now careened into sheer absurdity because disbursing bailout funds that you know will immediately be sent right back where they came from in the form of an interest payment is one thing, but literally paying yourself is another, and the IMF seems to have done the latter on Monday. 

Given this, it’s certainly not surprising that Christine Lagarde and company are not thrilled about the prospect of participating further in what has become an outright farce and as El Mundo reports, the fund has now told the ECB and the European Commission that it does not wish to be a part of a new program for Greece.

Via El Mundo (Google translated):

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has shown the Eurogroup their desire not to be part of a possible third bailout of Greece, which would amount to 50,000 million and would be vital for the survival of the Hellenic country. The absence of really emotional action by the executive with whom Tsipras contain spending and tackle the deficit, as well as the challenges it has done in recent weeks, as the readmission of public employees has caused the agency wants let all the weight of aid to Greece in the hands of the Eurozone and the ECB.

The fact that the IMF wants to stop being part of the bailout of a country is particularly serious, not in vain this institution is always the last resort of economies whose situation is more complicated. Therefore, the IMF has priority over other creditors in the order for recovery and, in all history, only Zimbabwe, Somalia and Sudan have failed to fulfill their obligations to it. 

However, given the difficulties to unlock a new rescue aid tranche that matures on June 30, the Washington-based organization fears that Greece will become the first economy in a developed nation it incurs a default, as They have confirmed to THE WORLD sources familiar with the process.

For Germany (where lawmakers are already pressuring Angela Merkel to cut the Greeks loose) this may be the final straw.

SCHAEUBLE SAYS IMF MUST STAY INVOLVED IN GREECE AID PROGRAM

Greece is now reliant on a similarly ridiculous circular funding scheme to pay public sector employees whereby pensioners will only receive payments if the government is successful at tapping pension funds for csh.

Via Bloomberg:

Greece may be able to meet end-May salaries and pensions payments, if pension funds, municipalities commit more of their cash reserves.

And because all of the above isn't preposterous enough, Greece will depend on the disbursment of the €7.2 billion left in its current program (about half of which is set to come from the IMF) to replenish the funds it raided from its SDR holdings:

Greece assumes that an agreement will be reached by end-May for disbursement of bailout funds, so that it can replenish holdings account reserves.

In sum: the IMF paid itself on behalf of Greece and will now be forced to pay itself back for paying itself later this month. Or, put differently, Greece has prepaid the IMF with IMF money it doesnt have.

Meanwhile, Greek pensioners are set to adopt a similarly ridiculous self-payment scheme in a matter of weeks even if they don't entirely appreciate the sheer insanity that's taken hold in Athens. 

And just to prove how dire the situation now is, Market News just reported the following shocker:

GREECE CASH RESERVES STAND AT APPROXIMATELY EUR 90 MILLION - EUROSYSTEM SOURCES

The Greek endgame is now upon us.

European shares dive into the red as Greece warns 'we could run out of money in a couple of weeks'

Greece repaying €750mn in interest, will run out of cash in ‘weeks’ without debt deal

Greece says it faces bankruptcy in weeks

Update

Europe Preparing Greek Bankruptcy Loan "In Event Of Grexit"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-12/europe-preparing-greek-bankruptcy-loan-event-grexit

Earlier today, we learned that, contrary to what Greek government officials had been implying for the better part of a week, Athens did not have enough money to make a €750 million payment to the IMF on Tuesday. Instead, Greeceborrowed most of the money (€650 million according to unnamed officials) from its IMF SDR reserves. This money must be paid back within 30 days. This effectively means that the IMF paid itself and it sets up a hilariously absurd scenario wherein assuming Greece manages to convince creditors to disburse a €7.2 billion tranche of aid later this month, the IMF will send money to Greece, who will send it right back to the IMF to replenish an IMF fund, which was drawn down by the IMF to pay itself back for money it loaned to Greece a long time ago. Put simply: Greece has taken circular funding schemes to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, the IMF is understandably fed up and according to El Mundo, the Fund will not participate in a new program for the Greeks, something which German FinMin Wolfgang Schaeuble indicated may be a dealbreaker when it comes to structuring another bailout for Athens. 

The takeaway: it’s likely over. Greece lacks the cash to keep up the facade and the IMF lacks the political will to perpetuate the farce any further. This suggests that both Greece and the creditors formerly known as the "Troika" will need to resort to Plan B. There’s a problem with that however — namely that EU officials have gone out of their way to make it clear that there is no Plan B, because to admit that such a plan existed would be to admit that the euro is in fact dissoluble after all, something which is taboo in polite discussions among European politicians. Here is but one example, via Reuters:

A top EU official urged Athens and its creditors to make progress in their talks on a cash-for-reform deal on Monday, warning there was no "Plan B" in the event of a Greek default.

"What we now need is real progress," Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission, told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

When asked whether there was a "Plan B" for the case of Athens defaulting, Timmermans replied: "No, there is no 'Plan B' for Greece."

That’s from Saturday. Here we are just three days later and as it turns out, Plan B does indeed exist and it is essentially a farewell package to the Greeks. here’s Bloomberg with more:

Euro-area governments are considering putting together an aid package for Greece to cushion the country’s economy if it was forced out of the euro, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The Greek government doesn’t expect to need that help. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says he’s not considering leaving the currency bloc and is focused on getting the aid he needs to avoid a default.

Even so, European officials are considering mechanisms to ring fence Greece both politically and economically in the event of a euro breakup, in order to shield the rest of the currency bloc from the fallout, one of the people said.

“There is always a plan B,” Filippo Taddei, an economic adviser to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, said in an interview in Rome on Tuesday, without referring to the aid package specifically. “But you have to ask yourself who has the ability to step in, in that event. And I think if you start making up a list you realize very quickly that that list is very short.”

 While euro-area finance ministers welcomed the progress Greece has made toward qualifying for more financial aid at a meeting in Brussels on Monday, policy makers are still concerned Tsipras may not be prepared to swallow the concessions necessary for a disbursement.

So on Saturday Plan B was unthinkable but on Tuesday there’s “always a Plan B,” which reminds us of the time when Mario Draghi told Zero Hedge that there’s no such thing as Plan B when it comes to insolvent periphery debtor nations getting cut off from ELA and crashing out of the currency bloc. As a reminder, here is what Draghi said: "If the Euro breaks down, and if a country leaves the Euro, it's not like a sliding door. It's a very important thing. It's a project in the European Union. That's why you have a very hard time asking people like me "what would happened if. No Plan B.”

Call it plan "B" or plan "C" or plan "contain this trainwreck so redenomination risk doesn't start creeping into the minds of Spanish and Italian depositors", but what it amounts to is a DIP loan and the very fact that it's being mentioned in the media likely means the plan has been hatched. The only remaining question is what the EU's farewell package to the Greeks will look like.