I was watching TV clips of the Greek riots. The bottom line rationale of the Greek rescue effort is the transfer of known and predictable near-total losses on Greek debt from the investors, banks and governments holding that debt to the taxpayers of the EU and the taxpayers funding the IMF in order to try to protect the euro until the next crisis.
Kondratiev's predictions are:
1. There is no way Greece will ever repay the $146 billion; either (a) the austerity measures if accepted and complied with will plunge the country into deep recession, or (b) the general strikes that the austerity measures inspire will cause depression.
2. In either case, the Greek government will fall for agreeing to the austerity conditions, and the government that gets elected will repudiate both the austerity measures and the euro. Because the European Central Bank is not the issuer of euro notes and because that function has been left to individual countries, all Greece needs to do to "unpick" from the euro is to declare that each Greek-issued euro note (one with a serial number starting with "Y") is now a drachma note and will be exchanged 1-for-1 by the Bank of Greece.
3. Then Greece will go back to devaluing and inflating and devaluing and inflating just as it used to do.
The euro has been fabulous for European trade, but with a majority of Germans polled saying they opposed the Greek bailout, something will have to give. I hazard a couple of guesses, first that the euro might split into a soft euro for the PIIGS and a hard euro for the other countries, or that the rest of the PIIGS would follow Greece and return to local currencies.
Bottom line: if you are holding any "Y" euro notes, deposit them in your bank as soon as you can for their full face value.