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Hand to mouth

Greece's "no" vote; its banks pay the price

By THE DATA TEAM

YESTERDAY'S decisive "No" vote in Greece's referendum, on whether the country should accept its European creditors' conditions for a new bail-out deal, was met with scenes of jubilation in Syntagma Square outside the country's parliament in Athens. Alexis Tsipras, Greece's radical left-wing prime minister, will count the result as a victory after promising voters that a "No" vote would enable him to demand a better deal from the country's lenders.

Yet Greece's future remains as bleakly uncertain as ever. The banks remain closed more than a full week after Mr Tsipras—on the announcement of the referendum—was forced to close down the financial sector and impose capital controls to avert a potentially disastrous bank run. As voters went to the polls, many cash machines in central Athens had run out of money, even though depositors are only allowed to withdraw €60 ($67) a day.

In a telephone call on Sunday night to Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Yannis Stournaras, the Greek central-bank governor, put in another plea for emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) to prop up the country’s four systemic banks. Over the last few months the ELA limit has been increased by a similar amount to the outflow of deposits from Greek banks, indicating that they do not have much left in reserve (see right-hand chart). If the ECB does not dole out more cash for Greece any time soon—which they refused to do at a meeting on July 6th—the weakest of its four big banks could collapse within days, Athenian bankers say. The threat of a “Grexit” from the euro, staved off in mid-2012 when Mr Tsipras's predecessor embraced fiscal and structural reforms, is not only back. For some international analysts, it is now the most likely scenario.

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