Greek Contagion Spreads As Several Italian Bank Stocks Failed To Open

This is how fragile the entire EU system is. If Greece sneezes, Italy coughs. The EU at best might be able to handle a Grexit, although that doesn’t look likely as stated here many times before. Look for the markets to go through a lot of turmoil but Greece is here to stay, whether its within the EU or a newly formed United States of Europe currently underway. Almost all experts agree it’s too strategically important to lose to the Sino-Soviet axis.

 

While things have normalized since the open thanks entirely to the SNB’s aggressive EUR-buying, CHF-selling intervention (good to see that central banks have read the BIS’ report and have learned from their prior intervention mistakes), earlier this morning we got a snapshot of what happens if and when the SNB, and then the ECB itself, finally lose control when as a result of the Greek crisis the contagion promptly spread a few hundred kilometers west to Italy where as the WSJ reported, “several Italian banks failed to start trading on Monday as fears over a Greek debt default induced many investors to shed peripheral stocks, including Italian, with banks suffering the most.”