If you ever read Friedman and Schwartz’s “A Monetary History of the United States” you know what happens when a central bank fails to act as a lender-of-last resort in the event of a bank run and/or at the same time fails to offset the impact on broad money growth of such bank run.

It of course happened in the US in 1930-31 and again in Europe after the collapse of Credit-Anstalt in Austria also in 1931. In both cases the result was a deep depression. Now it has happened again in Greece, but Greece is already in a deep economic depression.

Just have a look at this shocking graph from Macropolis.gr.

There is no great reason to trust eyeball-econometrics, but judging from the sharp drop in Greek July PMI (released today) then we should expect another 10-15% drop in Greek real GDP in the next couple of quarters. That would mean that we soon will have seen Greek real GDP being halved since the start of this crisis.

I think it will be very hard to find any other example of a (peacetime) collapse of real GDP of this magnitude in any other country in the world in the past 200 years and there is nothing positive to say about this. It is the terrible consequence of massive policy failures in Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin and Athens.

A truly Greek tragedy.

HT Joe Wiesenthal.

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