International investor Jim Rogers is urging Greece to just embrace the inevitable and “go bankrupt, get it over and start it over.”
He predicts that even if the Greek economy collapses, investors won’t remember it three months from now.
But mounting fears about Greece drove global stock markets down Monday after talks between the country and its creditors broke down, the Associated Press reported.
Greece's long-running debt crisis took a dangerous turn over the weekend after Greece's Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, said his government will hold a referendum on proposals made by the country's lenders.
European officials refused to extend the country's bailout program, which expires on Tuesday, the same day it's supposed to make a debt payment to the International Monetary Fund, the AP reported.
“Greece is a tiny part of the European economy and it’s nothing, it’s insignificant for the world economy. It’s a lot of headlines and a lot of noise; it will cause the markets to be disrupted for a while,”
he told RT.com.
“But three months from now, none of us will remember if Greece goes bankrupt.”
Rogers said “the Greek economy has been in a bad shape for…years, since they joined the EU.” Greece joined the European Union on Jan. 1, 1981. It joined the Eurozone on Jan. 1, 2001.
“If you ask me what they should do – is just go ahead and go bankrupt, get it over with and start it over. But all this calling names and blaming other people is not going to do any good,” he said.
Rogers also recently stressed the same beliefs to
MarketWatch.
“Greece is a sideshow that could turn into the main show because politicians keep making mistakes,” he said.
“What is best for Greece is to declare bankruptcy, stay in the euro, and start over. They will never be able to pay their debts,” he said.
“We’ve had states, cities, and counties go bankrupt, and they didn’t leave the U.S. They reorganized and started over. You don’t have to leave just because you go bankrupt. If Greece went bankrupt but stayed in the euro, we’d have a bit of a trauma but we’d move on. If they make Greece leave, it would turn into the main show.”
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank also capped its emergency support for the country's banks. That prompted the Greek government to close banks and announce limits on withdrawals. Daily cash withdrawals are capped at 60 euros ($67) per account,
the AP reported.
"Whenever you see any kind of bank line there is in the back of investors' mind the thought: 'What if it spreads? What if people panic?' " said Karyn Cavanaugh, senior market strategist at Voya Investment Management. "What's going on in Europe, of course it's going to roil markets in the short term." But for U.S. investor, she said, "the long-term impact is not that big of a deal."
Meanwhile, experts say that the drama in Greece should have little sway over the biggest financial question on the U.S. horizion – when will the Federal Reserve start raising rates?
Michael Cloherty, head of U.S. rates strategy at Royal Bank of Canada's RBC Capital Markets unit in New York, said events in Greece did not significantly change the outlook for the U.S. central bank.
"This isn’t a ‘watch Greece’ situation...While we have chaos in Greece, there are no signs of dramatic contagion yet, and that’s why it doesn’t change the Fed’s tone,”
he told Reuters.
(Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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