Author Topic: Where Do Greeks Stash Their Money?  (Read 3454 times)

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Offline BeeTee

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Where Do Greeks Stash Their Money?
« on: Wednesday, 04 February, 2015 @ 22:22:36 »
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Georgios Karavelas drives a taxi in Athens and for the past month has been a silent witness to what ordinary Greeks are doing with their cash.

One passenger, he said, told someone on his mobile phone that he’d withdrawn 25,000 euros from the bank, taken it home, worked loose a tile in the bathroom and stashed the money there. Another took the cash to his village and buried it in the garden. Yet another fashioned a small safe box in the air-conditioning unit on his balcony.

“I can’t fault these people,” said Karavelas, 37. “They were obviously people who had worked hard for their money, with families and jobs, not oligarchs.”

Withdrawals from Greek banks may have exceeded 15 billion euros ($17.2 billion) in the run-up to the elections that catapulted Alexis Tsipras and his anti-austerity Syriza party to power, including at least 11 billion euros in January, according to four bankers citing preliminary data. Tensions between the new government, which won on a platform of debt relief, and Greece’s creditors, including Germany, may keep up the pressure.

“Talks with the creditors is going to be a protracted process so you can’t rule out more pressure on deposits,” said Wolfango Piccoli, managing director at Teneo Intelligence in London. “There is plenty of uncertainty and that can make depositors nervous again.”

Greece’s bailout program ends on Feb. 28 and failure to come to an agreement with the troika of lenders from the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank could leave the country without funding to repay billions of euros in debt due in the coming months. Germany is prepared to wait until April or May, when Greece hits a cash crunch to strengthen its bargaining position, a person familiar with the matter said.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite6_1_04/02/2015_546873