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A meeting of the Eurogroup — which would have to agree to any plan — is currently scheduled for 8 p.m. in Brussels. That in itself is a delay from the original scheduled start.
It's going to be a long night in Brussels.
And now another dramatic report:
Faisal Islam — the economics editor at U.K.'s Channel 4 — reports on what's being said in local media in Cyprus.
Athens news agency: Anastasiades has threatened to resign over IMF plan, and let the people decide
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 24, 2013
most Greek media reporting Cypriot president has threatened to resign over bank of cyprus resolution...
— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 24, 2013
Ed Conway at Sky News passes on the same.
Greek press reporting Cypriot president told Lagarde "you're putting me in a position where I'll have to resign... You'll regret this."
— Ed Conway (@EdConwaySky) March 24, 2013
What's becoming clear is that it's the IMF, more than any other entity in this drama, that's playing hardball.
Peter Spiegel at the FT has a fantastic report about how the Troika (the ECB, IMF, and EU) is seeing tension within for the first time since the crisis began.
According to Spiegel, IMF chief Christine Lagarde has taken a hard line on not agreeing to deals that don't involve real restructuring.
But since Mr Strauss-Kahn’s exit and his replacement by Christine Lagarde, another former French finance minister, EU officials say the IMF has relied more heavily on what one eurozone official termed “the ayatollahs on the fund’s staff”. They have insisted on more credible debt projections before committing IMF lending.
“Lagarde lets the bureaucrats say the way it is and then she can make the political judgment,” said one official involved in multiple bailouts. “[Strauss-Kahn] didn’t want to massage it, but he was a deal maker. Lagarde wants to have an unbiased view of the situation and most of the time she takes that.”
In other words, no doing deals just for the sake of getting a deal done and moving on. It's more painful in the short-term, but it may be better than the long, slow bleed of unrealistically high debt levels and a never-ending austerity morass.