Greece Shutters Banks as Crisis Intensifies; Fintech's Many Fans

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Greece Bank Shutdown: Greece has closed its banks for the next six days and imposed capital controls in an effort to avert financial panic as the country edges closer to a potential exit from the eurozone. Over the weekend, steady streams of depositors had already emptied many ATMs in Athens, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rapidly escalating Greek debt crisis rattled global markets Monday, with the S&P 500 on track for a 1% loss when markets open in the U.S., according to a separate article in the Journal. The Financial Times discusses the ramifications of an increasingly possible Grexit with New York Fed head William Dudley, who says that while "U.S. banks don't have a big exposure to Greece," they might be impacted secondhand via their connections with other European countries. "My personal view is if this goes badly the market reaction may be bigger than what we realize," he tells the paper. The papers' coverage of the situation in Greece hints at differing sympathies. The Journal appears to blame Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for the breakdown in bailout talks, writing that he "had pushed his eurozone peers hard during five months of negotiation" and that "his defiant call for a referendum—and his encouragement to vote it down—has left him with few allies in Europe." The New York Times suggests a more favorable view of Tsipras' actions, writing that he "had consistently called for a broader, comprehensive deal that would liberate Greece from the economics of austerity." The Financial Times takes a broad perspective but suggests it will be difficult to turn around bailout negotiations at this point. "Tsipras' decision to hold a referendum has damaged the eurozone's trust in his government," the paper reports, "calling into question whether any agreement to avoid Grexit can be reached."

Everyone Wants a Piece of Fintech: Investors like superstar Momofuku chef David Chang are swarming to online lenders and other fintech startups, but the Journal has a few words of caution for eager backers. "For all their potential, fintech companies still have to prove they can grow," the paper writes. Just 800,000 consumers have taken out online loans thus far, and the industry made a total of $9 billion in loans in 2014—a teeny fraction of banks' overall loan volume. There's also the lingering question of how the upstarts' loan portfolios would fare in an economic downturn. Meanwhile, the FT is more concerned about the would-be investors who are getting left out in the cold. The paper reports that as more Silicon Valley companies, like personal-finance site Credit Karma, put off IPOs, the burgeoning wealth of the tech industry is being contained to "a charmed circle of investors able to get a foot in the door of the hottest new prospects … All the risks of this tech cycle are being shouldered by a far narrower circle of investors—but so are the rewards."

Financial Times

Barclays is rolling out three wearable payment devices meant to compete with Apple Pay in the U.K.: a wristband, a key fob and a sticker that can be patched onto any flat object. Each device will be hooked up to a digital wallet that can be funded online or with a mobile app, and will be available to any person who uses Visa or MasterCard.

It's Monday, which must mean it's time for news of a probe into yet another benchmark trading scandal. The New York Department of Financial Services has launched an investigation into whether banks attempted to rig the Isdafix benchmark, according to anonymice. The probe has yet to target specific banks. So far, Deutsche Bank and Barclays have been implicated in the Isdafix scandal by German regulator BaFin and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, respectively.

New York Fed head William Dudley says conditions are looking good for a rate hike in September, although of course there are no guarantees. "It would not shock me if we decided to lift off in September, or it wouldn't shock me if the data were a little softer and it caused us to wait," he tells the paper.

New York Times

A Times op-ed praises the Supreme Court for upholding the "disparate impact" legal theory under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, arguing that municipal housing policies have encouraged de facto segregation by building affordable housing primarily in low-income areas.

Elsewhere ...

Brookings Institution: The federal government can help states finance more green banks by clarifying and tweaking rules that will give greater access to Department of Energy loans and financing from the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utility Surface, according to a Brookings Institution blog post by Reed Hundt, chief executive of the nonprofit organization Coalition for Green Capital.

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