Tsipras’s brinkmanship

EU Prepares for Worst as Greece Drives Finances to Brink

Excerpt:

European officials are preparing for the worst as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s brinkmanship pushes Greece’s finances to the limit. Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Tsipras to accept the framework for financial aid as the German public turns against supporting Greece and euro-area officials demanded a proposal for stabilizing the country’s debt by the end of Friday. The International Monetary Fund team left Brussels earlier this week, despairing of Tsipras’s tactics. In response, Greece ruled out cutting pensions and demanded a debt restructuring. Bank stocks plunged. “People are really fed up with this,” UniCredit SpA Chief Global Economist Erik Nielsen said in a television interview. “They’ve never seen anything so completely ridiculous, frankly speaking, from a debtor country.”

Comment: To use a Poker analogy, Alexis Tsipras has a "handful of nothing"