1. No. The Euro will stand or fall depending on Germany's willingness to accept a Eurobancor, unrestricted Eurosystem money printing or a federal European employer/investor of last resort with an unlimited ECB overdraft facility. The Greek decision on austerity or not has nothing to do with it one way or another. Which means that Greek Euro membership will not be safe if it ditches austerity... but neither will it be if it implements austerity.


2. An all-out war is improbable. Greece has too many white people and too many NATO weapons. However, it is almost certain that you will be looking at a suspension of voting rights, freezing of cohesion funds and assorted other economic and political sabotage, ranging from the dubiously legal to the nakedly unconstitutional.

   But the alternative to anti-austerity policies, default and sanctions are not austerity, no default and no sanctions. Greece will eventually default. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either selling you a bill of goods or has rocks and gravel in his head. And when it does, this assault will come anyway.

   So the relevant question is whether compliance with the austerity measures will increase your preparedness for the default and consequent exclusion from hard currency credit. This is only true if the time it buys is spent building strategic food and fuel reserves, drawing up plans for rationing schemes, etc., and then only if these preparations increase preparedness faster than austerity measures increase the magnitude of the catastrophe.



3. It probably won't. At this point, anybody in the EU who does not have rocks and gravel in his head knows that Greece will default, and they're just playing musical chairs with the blame (and bill) for the ensuing clusterfuck. And those who have rocks and gravel in their heads will continue to pursue their current policies, undeterred by little things like obvious reality.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.