Greek Debt Crisis Adds to a Spike in Burglaries and Robberies
ATHENS — One evening three weeks ago in Kifissia, an affluent garden suburb of Athens, a retired financial adviser and his wife decided to take in one of the delights of summer here, an outdoor movie.
They pulled tight the shutters, set the alarm, locked the house and strolled off. Halfway through the movie the alarm company called, and they rushed home to find the alarm immersed in a bucket of water, the shutters jimmied and a safe emptied of jewelry. The speed and sophistication of the crime were astonishing, the financial adviser’s wife said, still feeling vulnerable and not willing to be identified by name.
At seemingly every dinner gathering in Athens this summer, the conversation turns to tales of break-ins, burglaries and robberies that have accompanied the government debt crisis. Even before the crisis shut down the banks and limited the availability of cash, crime of this sort was ticking upward. The economy has been in disarray. People have been out of work for years. The banks have been running out of money. It sounds a lot like the Great Depression in the United States. But it is Greece – and in some ways, the situation is worse.
But in the weeks before capital controls were imposed at the end of June, billions of euros fled the Greek banking system. Greeks feared that their euro deposits might be automatically converted to a new currency if Greece left the eurozone and would quickly lose value, or that they would face a “haircut” to their accounts if their bank failed amid the stresses of the crisis.
While the rich may have moved their money to Switzerland, Luxembourg or safe deposit boxes, the middle class has stashed not just cash but gold and jewelry, among other valuables, under the proverbial mattress.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/world/europe/greek-debt-crisis-adds-to-a-spike-in-burglaries-and-robberies.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld
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