Greece lurches towards euro exit

Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has failed to reach an agreement with Greece's creditors. Photo / AP

European Central Bank calls emergency summit after talks end in acrimony.

Greece lurched closer to an exit from the euro as a meeting of finance officials to reach a deal over aid dissolved in acrimony, forcing leaders to call for an emergency summit for Tuesday.

As the European Central Bank prepared for its own emergency session today to discuss Greece's liquidity, thousands of Greeks piled outside Parliament in Athens asking for the nation to be saved from default as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' Government blamed a conspiracy to blackmail Greece for the rancorous breakdown in talks.

With the spectre of capital controls looming, key players deciding Greece's fate voiced their exasperation with Greece's top negotiators while the silence of others, such as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, also spoke volumes.

"The key emergency is to secure a dialogue with adults in the room," International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde said after listening to Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis expound in Luxembourg yesterday.

"What we lack is a dialogue."

Greece and its creditors - the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission - seem further apart than ever after four hours of closed-door talks. Without a settlement, the ties still binding Greece to the currency bloc may begin to unravel with funding keeping Greek banks afloat under scrutiny.

"The extreme economic uncertainty coupled with fears of currency change have driven withdrawals to unprecedented levels, wiping in four days the cushion of about 3 billion of the Greek banking system," said Nicholas Economides, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Asked if he could imagine Greece being forced out of the euro, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch minister who leads the group of euro-area finance chiefs, said, "The way it goes now we're going in that direction."

The Athens Stock Exchange, among the year's worst performers, plunged this week to its lowest level in almost three years.

While Greece still has 12 days left before the bailout window shuts, the need for some Parliaments to sign off on any agreement the ministers can broker means it's already too late for them to access aid in time to pay the IMF about 1.5 billion at the end of the month, according to Dijsselbloem.

"Let's say that we do reach an agreement, it's unthinkable that the implementation and then disbursement will also have to take place before the end of the month," Dijsselbloem said.

"That is simply impossible."

To get its hands on some money, Greece will now look to extract an extension of its bailout agreement at a summit on Tuesday that will bring Tsipras and Germany's Angela Merkel, who has tried to smooth out tensions, in the same room.

Increasingly isolated among his European peers, Tsipras was in St. Petersburg to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin though there was little sign any financial help would come out of it. Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Russia wasn't ready to buy Greece's debt or bonds.

The gathering in Luxembourg highlighted the disconnect between what the Greek leadership sees as its truth - vulturous creditors out to squeeze a small, vulnerable country - and what the rest of the euro members say is the reality: Without further belt-tightening, it's over for Greece.

"I think we have come pretty much to a dead end," said Finnish Finance Minister Alexander Stubb.

The problem is, as the Maltese Finance Minister Edward Scicluna put it, that nobody "wants to pull the plug".

- Bloomberg