Greece Given 24-Hour Deadline

Never a dull moment over there.

At the Guardian UK, "Eurozone struggles to find joint response to Greek referendum":

GUARDIAN: Greece given 24 hour deadline #tomorrowspaperstoday #BBCPapers pic.twitter.com/xpENuhvFnL

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) July 6, 2015

Heads of governments at odds as Germany and European commission let Greece stew while France, Italy and Spain are impatient for a deal.

Germany and France scrambled to avoid a major split over Greece on Monday evening as the eurozone delivered a damning verdict on Alexis Tsipras’s landslide referendum victory on Sunday and Angela Merkel demanded that the Greek prime minister put down new proposals to break the deadlock.

As concerns mount that Greek banks will run out of cash, and about the damage being inflicted on the country’s economy, hopes for a breakthrough faded. EU leaders voiced despair and descended into recrimination over how to respond to Sunday’s overwhelming rejection of eurozone austerity terms as the price for keeping Greece in the currency.

Tsipras, meanwhile, moved to insure himself against purported eurozone plots to topple him and force regime change by engineering a national consensus of the country’s five mainstream parties behind his negotiating strategy, focused on securing debt relief. Tsipras also sacrificed his controversial finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in what was seen as a conciliatory signal towards Greece’s creditors.

In Paris, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande tried to plot a common strategy after Greeks returned a resounding no to five years of eurozone-scripted austerity. The two leaders were trying to find a joint approach to the growing crisis ahead of an emergency eurozone summit on Tuesday to deal with the fallout.

But Merkel said there was no current basis for negotiating with the Greek side and called on Tsipras to make the next move.

As eurozone leaders prepared for today’s emergency summit in Brussels, the heads of government were at odds. France, Italy and Spain are impatient for a deal while Germany, the European commission and northern Europe seem content to let Greece stew and allow the euphoria following Sunday’s vote to give way to the sobering realities of bank closures, cash shortages and isolation.

Greek banks are to remain closed until Thursday at the earliest, it was announced, with ATM withdrawals rationed to €60 daily.

“The prospects of a happy resolution of this crisis are rapidly diminishing,” said the British chancellor, George Osborne, after speaking to some of the key policymakers. “If there is no signal from these meetings that Greece and the eurozone are ready to get around the table again, we can expect the financial situation in Greece to deteriorate rapidly.”

The commission had nothing positive at all to say about Sunday’s Greek referendum, while Germany’s increasingly hardline social democratic leader, Sigmar Gabriel, warned that Greece was on the brink of insolvency.

He accused Tsipras, the radical leftist prime minister who outmanoeuvred the rest of the eurozone with his plebiscite, of ruthlessly pursuing the Greek national interest at everyone else’s expense. His message suggested a Grexit was now inevitable as he stressed the need for EU humanitarian programmes to forestall social implosion in Greece.

Utterly amazing.

Still more.