Greek Investors Apparently Surprised By Stuff No One Should Be Surprised About


The latest news from Greece is a bit peculiar:

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told his new cabinet on Wednesday that he would move swiftly to negotiate debt relief, but would not engage in a confrontation with creditors that would jeopardize a more just solution for the country….Later, the new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, appeared to harden the tone, saying that Greece’s bailout deals were “a toxic mistake” and that the new government was determined to change the logic of how the crisis had been tackled.

While many Greeks were hopeful that Mr. Tsipras would follow through with even a fraction of his populist promises, investors were more rattled. The Athens Stock Exchange, which already had billions of euros in value wiped out during Greece’s election campaign, fell around 7.5 percent in midday trading on Wednesday after slumping around 11 percent on Tuesday. Shares in financial companies in Greece plummeted more than 17 percent on Wednesday.

I wonder what has the stock market so spooked? After all, Tsipras is just doing what he’s said he was going to do all along. Everyone expected him to take at least this hard a line on Greek debt, if not harder. So why the sudden panic? Shouldn’t this have been priced in long ago? What’s new here?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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