Exodus, chapter 1: Two years after the crisis began, a Greek exit could still cause havoc

Economist
May 19, 2012

The odds of a Greek exit from the euro shorten by the day. An inconclusive result to a first election on May 6th has led to a caretaker government, and the scheduling of another poll in mid-June. The obvious trigger for a Greek exit would be an election result signalling rejection of Greece’s austerity programme. But events could move faster still if Greeks start voting with their mouses and begin a bank run.

Runs these days start not with a queue of people lining up to withdraw cash but with clicks of a computer to transfer money abroad or to buy bonds, shares or other assets. The banking system has lost about a third of its total deposits over the past two years (see chart 1), some of this as people run down savings. There are worrying indications that this trickle of deposits has started to swell in recent days.

Karolos Papoulias, the president of Greece, said on May 14th that he had been warned by the central bank that depositors had just withdrawn some €700m ($894m) from Greek banks. Reliable figures will not officially be released for weeks, but bankers say that as much as €1.2 billion flowed out on the 14th and the days immediately after. Bankers say that outflows have continued through this week but at a much slower pace. “Most of the hard money has already left,” says one. “Now we are seeing a flare-up [of withdrawals] from small depositors who don’t know what to make of what is said on the evening news.”

More worrying still is the potential for deposit runs to spread to other vulnerable euro-zone countries such as Portugal or Spain. “The typical thing with a bank run is it trickles and then it floods,” says one banker. “The real concern is that you could have the dam breaking, first in Greece, but then elsewhere.” For now, households in other countries seem to be leaving their deposits where they are. But big companies are sweeping money out of peripheral banks and countries. In Britain some local-government bodies are reportedly moving their deposits from Santander’s British bank, even though it is locally capitalised and supervised.

More