Over at the Washington Post Max Ehrenfreund proceeds to think himself into a circle to such a degree that that his head is actually fully up his ass:
Suppose senior government officials in Greece had concluded that the euro was a failed experiment, that the rest of the continent would never extend reasonable terms to their country and would instead doom it to perpetual recession, and that the only way to save Greece from disaster — and Europe, too — was to begin the process of unwinding the common currency.
They’d have encountered a major obstacle to leaving the euro: Greeks really like it. To get rid of it, the country’s leaders would have had just one option: sabotage negotiations with the creditors, blame them for being unreasonable, and then eventually tell voters that Greece has no choice but to go back to the drachma.
Seriously?
Greece has none of the infrastructure to even print Drachmas, because the Greeks were literally forced to smash their printing presses when they joined the Euro:
With speculation swirling that Greece might be forced out of the euro and have to print its own money after a weekend referendum, its finance minister on Thursday said the country no longer had the presses to make drachmas.
“We don’t have the capacity,” Yanis Varoufakis told Australian public radio network ABC.
In 2000, the year before Greece joined the eurozone, “one of the things we had to do was get rid of all our printing presses” as part of the bloc’s assertion that “this monetary union is irreversible,” he said.
“We smashed the printing presses — we have no printing presses,” Varoufakis said.
This is widely known, and it was a policy that was across the Euro Zone.
While it might be possible to get some currency printed up by a 3rd party (North Korea comes to mind) but they appear not to have taken any of the requisite steps to reintroducing the currency.
I am sick to death of this “too clever by half” contrarian bullsh%$.
It’s a cheap trick to make stupid pundits appear smart.