The Possibility of a Hellenic Exit from the Eurozone: The Plan B

Abstract

After 2010 and the Greek economic crisis, a major concern of the Eurozone was what will happen with the country’s membership. There were several opinions about what Greece should do; many economists believed that leaving the Euro could lead to the collapse of the whole union in a chain reaction, others however believed that Greece could only be saved if it left the union and tried to achieve external devaluation with its own new national currency. Greece asked for help from the IMF and tried to comply with the austerity measures in order to achieve internal devaluation and finally improve competitiveness. In this dissertation paper I examined several other union breakups in order to draw some lessons; in most cases exiting a union was encouraging for the economies leaving the unions. Furthermore, I ran regression analyses to see how the Greek bond yields, bond spreads and CDS spreads are affected by the situation and also how the borrowing costs of Greece along with the risk of investing in Greek sovereign debt titles is affected by the credit rating of Greece set by the three credit rating agencies. Moreover, after comparing the expectations of the Troika to the real data after the implementation of the Troika’s program I found out that the Troika greatly underestimated the negative impacts of its policies and that after three years of austerity policy, the Hellenic economy was not able to recover. Considering that the only other solution for Hellas, is leaving the Eurozone, I constructed a Plan B, indicating the steps that the Greek government should follow after a Hellexit.