First Sighting of Drachma in the Wild, Via Credit-Card Mystery

According to Bloomberg, Athens is already charging its foreign customers in drachma.

Between June 28 and July 4 at a Hilton hotel in Athens, transactions on a Bloomberg reporter's Visa credit card issued by Citigroup Inc. were posted as being carried out in ``Drachma EQ."

The inexplicable notation -- bear in mind, the euro remains Greece's official currency -- flummoxed two very polite customer service representatives and spokesmen for the companies involved. It depicts a currency changeover that the Greek government and European officials have been working for over six months to avoid.

Banks around the world are bracing for the increasingly real possibility that Greece may be forced to abandon the euro, a currency it shares with 18 other European countries. European negotiators have given Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras until Sunday to work out a final deal of austerity and economic reforms in return for more financing.

www.bloomberg.com...

This is the copy of the credit card bill with the charge in drachma.

a reply to: Telos

Seems to me that a corporation along the chain of billing probably just put in a precautionary action to be prepared for a change in currency. These things often go through several companies along a chain, from the hotel itself, to a secure information exchange, to the Hotel bank, to another bank, to the credit card company...

Any corporation along that chain could have simply been prepared for a change and made a small error in making it live before a deliberate decision to do so.

If this were actual national policy then this would have appeared across several sources at once, as businesses made the switch at a specific time on a specific date.

Looks like Human error to me.

a reply to: Rocker2013

That's speculation. I'm wondering if there is more to this than meets the eye.

Eta : Apparently Greece has already been talking to money printers in Britain about printing drachmas.

Months ago I typed that somewhere Drachma's were being printed, just in case, no idea what thread though!