Tomorrow Will Be Interesting in Athens

I've been following the Grexit drama for what seems like most of my life, though in reality it has only been several months (with roots reaching back to 2009). But we finally seem to be coming to the end game.

Dorothea Lambros stood outside an HSBC branch in central Athens on Friday afternoon, an envelope stuffed with cash in one hand and a 38,000 euro ($43,000) cashier’s check in the other. 

She was a few minutes too late to make her deposit at the London-based bank. She was too scared to take her life-savings back to her Greek bank. She worried it wouldn’t survive the weekend. 

“I don’t know what happens on Monday,” said Lambros, a 58-year-old government employee. 

Nobody does. Every shifting deadline, every last-gasp effort has built up to this: a nation that went to sleep on Friday not knowing what Monday will bring. A deal, or more brinkmanship. Shuttered banks and empty cash machines, or a few more days of euros in their pockets and drachmas in their past - - and maybe their future.

Good luck to the Greeks, but this seems unlikely to end well for them. As Margaret Thatcher noted, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money, and Greece has run out.