European officials may not like it, but the prospect of Greece leaving the euro is a serious possibility.
The picture will become clearer after a Greek election on 17 June.
If the winners are hostile to the austerity measures demanded by the European Union and IMF, then Greece might have to look for a new currency.
It would not be a simple case of resurrecting Greece's old currency the drachma.
Changing currency is a complicated process that would take at least six months and probably much longer.
So the new Greek government might want to call Warren Coats.
Over the last 20 years at the International Monetary Fund, he has advised numerous countries on how to create currencies.
His clients have included nations that emerged from the Soviet Union including Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Mr Coats has also helped Iraq and Afghanistan and, most recently, Southern Sudan to launch new money.
He says there are three phases to the process.
Currency design and production
"Deciding what and who appears on a nation's currency might sound trivial, but it is highly political," said Mr Coats.
Bosnia-Hercegovina is a good example of how difficult the situation can be.
In the late 1990s after a bloody war for independence the nation had to form a new currency.
But the three groups that make up the population, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs could not agree on who to put on the notes - even when the choice was limited to literary and artistic figures.
"Usually two would agree one would disagree," said Mr Coats.
"This went on for many months. And in the end there was never an agreement," he said.
The head of the central bank, Peter Nicholl, who was a New Zealander appointed by the IMF, decided what went on the currency.
In Greece's case, the situation is much less fraught. It can draw on the images and figureheads used on its previous currency the drachma.
It may though have to decide on how many denominations of note there will be and what they will be worth.
There is useful rule of thumb to help with that.
Experts say the largest coin should be worth around 2% of the average day's wage and the smallest note should be worth 5% of the average day's wage.
Once those details are sorted out the notes will have to be printed, which is usually done by a specialist printing firm.
It is estimated that for a country the size of Greece that would cost $50-$60m.
There are not many firms that can handle a contract of that size and if they are busy then Greece might have to wait for its new currency.
Analysts say there is no chance of a new currency before the end of this year.
"If this was a serious consideration for 2012 the presses would have to be running already. And there are no credible rumours that that is happening," said Paul Jones an analyst at Panmure Capital.
Preparing rules for exchange
Getting the new currency printed is just the start of the process.
Greek officials would then have to work out how to get that new currency into the system.
The problem for Greece is that the population is unlikely to want to exchange their euros for the new currency.
Rules may have to be put in place to prevent large amounts of euros leaving the country.
There would have to be an information campaign to make sure the population understood how the process would work.
The question of timing also has to be addressed at this stage, ideally banks and other businesses would need enough time to adapt their systems.
The notes would have to be distributed to banks and a launch date set.
Legal issues
Notes and coins are just pieces of paper and bits of metal until they have the status of legal tender.
That requires laws which define and control the use of a currency.
When swapping a currency these have to be adapted and laws will have to be approved in Parliament.
Business will have to look closely at the new legislation to see if contracts priced in the old currency are still valid or need renegotiation.
So should Greece embark on such a lengthy and expensive process?
Mr Coats has this final thought: "The majority of Greeks want to keep the euro because they don't trust their government and central bank to do better with a new currency of their own than they did with the old one."
Can You Make Money by Buying From Facebook's IPO? - huffingtonpost.co.uk
The answer is simple. Only if they can turn their organically grown database into a revenue stream channel the $100 billion valuation makes sense and one can make money out of it. If you think this is a good answer, think again?
This answer fails to understand the influential power social connections can have long-term. By thinking you can't make money since users aren't clicking on ads you are missing the whole point. In the online world we are all used to measuring everything from click through rates to sales in real time, however with social sites like Facebook one must have a holistic approach in order to reap the benefits which lie underneath the surface. It's a bit like saying we shouldn't invest in customer service because it doesn't produce returns; while you may not be able to track the return on investment on your customer service initiatives like you can with your marketing campaigns, that's not to say that investing in customer service won't yield positive returns.
A new report by internet marketing research company Comscore suggests that social media marketing can show a positive return on investment by directly influencing sales, but it has to be measured in a different way to conventional online marketing since it's not ads that are driving sales, building brands and creating customer loyalty. It's the very act of being social and engaging with your customers. That means understanding the link between Facebook's various ad units with what Comscore calls free earned media, which is essentially the posts and other actions by brand and consumers on the social network.
The Comscore report cited examples of how advertising on Facebook could be traced to sales increases. For example, by tracking consumers who were Starbucks fans on Facebook against a control group of shoppers who weren't exposed to those messages, Comscore found that over a four-week period, 2.12% of the brand's fans and their friends made a purchase at the coffee shop. That's 0.58 percentage points higher than the 1.54% for the control group. That suggests that fans and their friends made 37.7% more purchases than those not exposed to the brand's earned media.
So all in all, can we buy Facebook shares at the current price and still make money. While the answer seems positive, you may want to wait as the current scepticism around Facebook's potential to deliver a return on investment may result in share prices dropping short-term, only to start seeing an upward movement medium to long term but we will most probably have to wait several years to witness this change. I guess the question is, if social media advertising is still in its infancy, where is the social media stock market? You can't expect for investors to understand now what most marketers still don't.
Social media will create a revolution in how we behave ourselves and eventually will start the next bull market, but not for at least three to five years. Social media gives the ability for everybody to be in instant communication with everyone else, and that's very powerful. We must not forget that Facebook is the pioneer of the social media generation, and remains as the most powerful social media network in the planet.
Follow Vashi Dominguez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VashiDominguez
Euro zone finance ministers to discuss outcome of Greek vote on Sunday - Reuters UK
BRUSSELS |
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers are scheduled to hold a teleconference on Sunday evening to discuss the outcome of Greek elections, two euro zone officials said on Thursday.
Greece holds a parliamentary election on Sunday and polls show that the leftist SYRIZA party, that rejects the terms of the euro zone bailout for Athens, is neck-and-neck with the pro-bailout New Democracy party.
If STRIZA won the election and Greece were to tear up the terms of the bailout, France and other euro zone countries have warned that Greece could face leaving the euro zone and returning to the drachma currency.
One euro zone official said that the main concern, if SYRIZA overwhelmingly won the election, was the risk of large capital outflows from Greece if depositors worry their savings in euros could later be frozen or converted into drachmas.
"It is not even about a bank run on Monday morning after the elections. People can now log on to internet banking and make transfers on Sunday evening as well," a third euro zone official said, explaining the rationale of the ministerial call.
If a SYRIZA victory sparked panic about a return of the drachma, the immediate action would come from the country's central bank, backed by the European Central Bank.
The Greek central bank has the ability to directly inject cash into the country's banks, if savers rush for their money, in the form of Emergency Liquidity Assistance, which although provided by the ECB, would be underwritten solely by Greece.
Top ECB officials and staff would also keep a close watch from Frankfurt and keep in touch with other euro zone central banks, in case there were signs that people in other countries such as Spain were starting to pull their cash from banks.
Among the euro zone contingency plans for a possible Greek exit from the euro are the suspension of the Schengen passport-free zone and imposing capital controls and limiting ATM withdrawals.
(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Andreas Framke in Berlin, editing by Diana Abdallah)
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