Greece's debt woes have Merkel pleading for patience - The Best from Greece

With crashing stock markets, a plummeting currency and furious talk of military interventions in the Greek economy, this may be remembered as the Monday when the European crisis turned into an utter cataclysm.

The decline of London, Berlin and Europe-wide stock indices by at least two per cent each on Monday morning, along with the fall of the euro to a 10-year low against the yen and a seven-month trough against the U.S. dollar, came as no surprise to Europeans who watched the battle between Berlin and Athens over the Greek debt crisis go ballistic over the weekend.

Greece, pushed to the wall by a sequence of German-led bailouts that have done little more than pile on more debt, announced on Monday that it is nearly out of cash. Deputy Finance Minister Filippos Sachinidis said in a TV interview that the country only has funds to last until mid-October.

After that, it will depend on another tranche of bailout funds from the International Monetary Fund – but with its domestic economy sliding sharply backwards as a result of previous bailouts and tax revenues therefore dwindling, Greece is unlikely to meet the IMF’s fiscal conditions.

This has led to desperate measures. On Sunday, Greece announced an emergency property tax of about 50 cents per square foot on all buildings, payable immediately, in a effort to top up government coffers enough to meet bailout conditions.

Senior German officials leaked suggestions to the media that Greece be forced out of the 17-country euro zone and returned to the drachma – a move that would likely do terminal damage to German banks, which hold huge shares of euro-denominated Greek debt, and might send Italy and Spain plummeting into default.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, snuffed out any discussion of “Drachmaization” of Greece on Monday, saying that any country leaving the euro zone would trigger a catastrophic domino effect. But she said she agreed with economy minister Philipp R

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