The Euro Scream – a new take on the Edvard Munch original.

An interesting exercise in compare and contrast with the following articles as The Telegraph suggests all is well in Greece whilst Reuters hints at The IMF refusing the next funding payment due in a few weeks time.

Firstly, The Telegraph today:

Greece will not default if it gets IMF aid, says central bank governor George Provopoulos

The boss of Greece’s central bank has insisted that the embattled country can handle its debts on its existing aid programme.
George Provopoulos, who is also a member on the European Central Bank (ECB) led a raft of politicians and regulators who moved to calm market fears over Greece’s financial stability.

“Greece will be able to pay back the full amount of its debt without any kind of re-profiling if it fully implements the adjustment programme,” said Mr Provopoulos.

He added that the ECB would “do whatever is necessary to ensure that there are no second-round price and wage effects from the recent rise in headline inflation”.

The key phrase in there being the highlighted one – “if it fully implements the adjustment program”.

Secondly, Reuters, also today :

Greece has missed all fiscal targets agreed under its bailout plan, a mission from an international inspection team found, putting further funding for Athens at risk, according to a German magazine.

“The troika asserts in its report to be presented next week that Greece had missed all its agreed fiscal targets,” weekly Spiegel magazine reported in a prerelease.

The International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — known as the troika — currently have a team in Greece assessing how sustainable the country’s debts are.

The mission will be holding meetings next week before an expected finalisation of the report.

“The deficit in the public budget was higher than expected,” the magazine said, referring to the report’s findings.

“The reason is that the Greek government still spends more than agreed in the aid programme. On top of that tax income is still lower than demanded.”

The IMF has already said it cannot release its part of a 12 billion euro (10.4 billion pound) aid tranche to Greece next month if fiscal conditions underpinning the bailout are not met and the European Commission’s top economic official was quoted as saying the EU was setting the same conditions.

Taken together it seems to suggest that Greece will indeed default unless there are some cats waiting to be pulled out of various EU bags to save the European banking system all over again.

ZeroHedge has a slightly more down to earth view as you would expect :

In other words, this could be the political game over for Greece, whose fate as has been disclosed recently, is intimately tied with the perception that it is following the troika’s demands for fiscal change. If the three key bailout institutions are already leaking that Greece is done, next week could well be the beginning of the end for the €. In about 48 hours, even as America is enjoying a Monday off (or precisely because to that, to avoid a market panic), the European market could be digesting a very bitter pill of testing just how well pre-provisioned all those German, French and Dutch banks really are.

Just how long will our world leaders be able to keep kicking the can down the road, or, more importantly, how much longer are we going to get taxed to buggery to keep the banking system solvent?