Over the past several months, as a result of their lockout from capital markets, Greek banks’ reliance on the ECB’s Emergency Liquidity Assistance has soared, and at last check was somewhere in the mid-€70 billion range.
The conventional wisdom was that the ECB was merely plugging the hole created weekly (and often, daily) as a result of the chronic Greek bank run which has seen tens of billions in deposits withdrawn from Greek banks since Syriza officially took power earlier this year.