For those interested in financial/economic types of crises, the next couple weeks might be a time to observe what happens to ordinary Greeks as their country totters on the edge of dropping the Euro and switching to another currency--call it a New Drachma, if you will. Possibily relevant and enlightening for us here in the US. Certainly a foreshadowing of things that might later play out for our friends in other Eurozone countries like Ireland and Spain.

I had commented a while back on the slow motion bank run going on in Greece as Greeks slowly took out a significant chunk of their savings out of the banks. According to some reports, a whole lot of money has drained all of a sudden this week as the Greek government founders.

However, there are apparently no long lines at banks and ATM's (from what I've read so far), so it's not your typical vision of a "bank run," at least not yet. It could be businesses and the ultra wealthy moving the last remaining chunks of money electronically and not ordinary Greeks doing the withdrawing, since most ordinary Greeks probably don't have a whole lot of savings left at this point anyway.

Anyway, it's one thing to see a currency devaluation in a developing country, but it's going to be a shock to see folks still holding a high profile currency like the Euro in bank accounts suddenly given devalued New Drachmas instead. Poof! Like seeing your stock portfolio crash by 40% (unfortunately, many of us did experience that in 2008).

I don't think the society will unravel, although surely people will be hurting and many in a really bad way. On a more macro level, things may not be as bad as many predict. Then again, the recent crash and burn of MF Global and a $2 billion loss at JP Morgan remind us that at least in the banking/finance worlds, things are so complicated and highly leveraged (and worse things I won't mention) that it's hard for anyone to really know what the ultimate damage might be in this scenario.

Or...this post might be premature. Maybe it's not the time for Greece to drop the Euro, just yet, although I believe that's a foregone conclusion. We shall see.