Quote from trefoil:
I beg to differ.
There could, maybe, be a short-term drop, but if Greece goes, the euro would definitely go up longer term. In my mind, the only question is the short term.
I'm quite certain, and I freely admit I could be wrong, that the ECB has figured out how to keep the banks afloat come whatever contagion there may be. That's really the key. And since Portugal has also been long known to be a basket case, I'm sure they can deal with that.
Beyond those two, I'd put the odds in favor of your side of the argument.
What happens to Spain & Italy is going to depend on how their governments deal with their respective messes. I think the institutional folks know this & can separate Spain & Italy from Greece & Portugal.
They both, however, have interesting regional problems: the Northern League in Italy's case, which is the voice of Milan, the city the rest of Italy lives off, and Catalonia, which really means Barcelona, which actually is far more economically viable than the rest of Spain, and knows it, in Spain's case. I'm not sure you could say the rest of Spain lives off Barcelona, but Spain's certainly not shy about sucking as much of its wealth out of it as it can get away with without causing an actual civil war to break out.
IMO both Milan & its surrounding territory and Catalonia would be better off splitting from both their "mother countries" and the euro, and establishing their own currencies, but that's another thread entirely.