EU Calls Emergency Summit as Greece Runs Out of Time

Greece lurched closer to an exit from the euro as a meeting of finance officials to reach a deal over aid dissolved in acrimony, forcing leaders to call for an emergency summit for Monday.

As the European Central Bank prepared for its own emergency session on Friday, thousands of Greeks piled outside parliament in Athens asking for the nation to be saved from default. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras government blamed a conspiracy to blackmail Greece for the rancorous breakdown in talks.

With the specter of capital controls looming, key players deciding Greece’s fate voiced their exasperation with Greece’s top negotiators while the silence of others, such as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, also spoke volumes.

“The key emergency is to secure a dialogue with adults in the room,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said after listening to Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis expound in Luxembourg on Thursday. “What we lack is a dialogue.”

‘Parasitic Behavior’

Greece was working toward a “good agreement,” but any deal had to be based on reforms that “attack parasitic, rent-seeking behavior” and not changes that “jack up tax rates and reduces benefits to the weakest,” he said in a blog post after the meeting.

Greece and its creditors -- the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission -- seem further apart than ever after four hours of closed-door talks. Without a settlement, the ties still binding Greece to the currency bloc may begin to unravel with funding keeping Greek banks afloat under scrutiny.

“The extreme economic uncertainty coupled with fears of currency change have driven withdrawals to unprecedented levels, wiping in four days the cushion of about 3 billion euros of the Greek banking system,” said Nicholas Economides, professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Asked if he could imagine Greece being forced out of the euro, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch minister who leads the group of euro-area finance chiefs, said, “The way it goes now we’re going in that direction.”

(Πηγή: bloomberg.com)