“Drachma nostalgia” was on the menu on Thursday at an Athens conference addressed by FinMin Yanis Varoufakis, who said he wished the country had not switched to the euro!

Moreover, the self-described “erratic Marxist” and globe-trotting academic said he wouldn’t sign up a bailout deal that would send Greece into a “death spiral”. Months ago he told the BBC that Greece didn’t need the final bailout tranche of 7.2 bln euros, with the ensuing period witnessing practically half the leftist Cabinet criss-cross Europe and beyond to secure the money.

Varoufakis told the 19th Economist Roundtable with the Greek Government that he would reject any agreement in which “the numbers do not add up”. “Numbers” released a day earlier pointed to the “R” word: “recession”.

“I wish we had the drachma, I wish we had never entered this monetary union … And I think that deep down all member-states of the eurozone would agree with that now; because it was very badly constructed. But once you are in, you don’t get out without a catastrophe,” he said, without however, using the “Hotel California” lyrics this time: / You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!/

Meanwhile, further north, powerful Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann directly questioned the rationale behind the ECB’s assistance to cash-strapped and liquidity challenged Greece.
“Given the ban on monetary financing of states, I don’t think it’s OK that banks which don’t have access to the markets are being granted loans which then finance the bonds of their government, which doesn’t have access to the markets itself,” he told the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Eurozone rules ban the central bank from directly bailing out member-states, with rising opposition being aired over the incremental increase of the Emergency Liquidity Assistance ceiling for Greece.