Market Insight: Ignore Greece… This Is the Real Story in Europe

Posted by Chris Hunter - Bonner & Partners

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Greece faces another big deadline. 

By tomorrow, the debtor nation par excellence must come up with €750 million ($836 million), which it owes in loan repayments to the International Monetary Fund. 

If it doesn’t come up with the cash, it joins the ranks of Somalia, Zimbabwe and Sudan in being late repaying IMF loans. 

This has prompted another emergency meeting in Brussels by Greece’s creditors to discuss the “Greece problem.” 

Maybe Greece will default. Maybe it won’t. But if it does, it hardly spells doom for the euro zone. 

After all, Greece contributes all of 2% of the 19-country euro zone’s GDP. 

And the total value of Greek debt is just €340 billion ($378 billion). So, if it decided not to pay a cent of that back – highly unlikely even in the event of some form of default – the other 18 euro-countries could cover the fallout by borrowing 3% more collectively. 

Meanwhile, as we’ve been pounding the table on lately, the real story is that European stocks continue to handily outperform US stocks this year.

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As you can see above, the Euro Stoxx 50 Index, which tracks 50 of the largest blue-chip European stocks, is up 16% so far in 2015 versus a 2% gain for the Dow.