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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Can Greece really make a drachma as a way out of this crisis?

No one in Athens is mentioning a plan B but if talks to find a deal with creditors fail, Greece will have to print its old currency. Whether it can is another matterGreece’s ability to print its way out of crisis would start at 320 Mesogeion Avenue. It is here, behind high walls and iron bars – daubed with the revolutionary graffiti of anti-capitalist leftists – that the country’s central bank has a currency press. Set amid pistachio and pine trees, it is here that Greece once printed drachmas, the world’s oldest currency and the one used from its modern incarnation almost 200 years ago until it joined the euro. If a euro exit beckoned, and the legal tender was re-embraced, the printing works in the iron-clad building would start to roll. Related: Greece crisis: Tsipras under pressure to submit reform blueprint to creditors Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com