Whereas there will be one if it stays?

There are three stories about the euro crisis: the Republican story, the German story, and the truth. -- Paul Krugman

I must strenously insist this is wrong. Greece and Portugal are, all their weak sides granted, still modern capitalist economies full of hard-working entrepenurial innovative people (as long as they have jobs), who have created excellent business before and will do so again, as soon as the EU allows them too.

Cuba and North Korea on the other hand, are worhless commie dictatorships, shackling their own people and preventing them from initiating any kind of enterprise. These countries would not be able to export anything even if they devalued their currencies to Hell and back. I mean, useless Cuba, famous for sugarcane, dirt poor labourers and oil shortages, even managed to entirely miss out on the sugarecane ethanol boom!

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

if a state like Greece leaves the EU there wont be any short-term recovery.

We're two years late and twenty percentage points of unemployment short for the "keep the Euro" side of this discussion to have any rational basis in observable reality.

Moreover, things like a long term shortage of fuels can perform social transformations that may not even be possible to reverse.

Now please tell me how allowing the ECB to destroy your society, government and economy will make that better?

The lack of internal production on the primary and secondary sectors, and the cut off from external markets would impose problems that couldn't be solved either easily or fast.

It hasn't. Stop scaring people with monsters under the bed. It's fundamentally dishonest.

True, a lot can be done at the community level, but the impoverishment would still be huge.

The best parallel I can draw is with what happened to Cuba and North Korea once the USSR collapsed.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.