At another example of private incentive ingenuity Banks in Greece have come up with a way to make money out of bad private debts.

In Greece a widely used form of payment among businesses are postdated bank checks. Say business A owes money to business B, business A then issues a check with a date of payment on it after say, 4 months or sometimes more. Ofcourse postdating checks is not officially allowed and one can move to try to cash a check at any date, such practice however is frowned upon by the business community and there is a gentlemen’s agreement that dictates sticking to the date on the check.

Now, often when the much awaited date on the check comes it is not covered by an account balance, rules in Greece say that you must then wait 7 working days for the check to clear before declaring it bounced or “uncovered„.

After the said 7 days you have to have the bank put a stamp on the check that reads „this check was found to be uncovered„ if u dont do that you lose the right to claim the money in a court, because after 7 days a check is considered payed if not stamped.

Here comes the crippy part, in order to stamp that bounced check most banks demand a special “stamping fee„ payment by the holder of the check. That fee can range anywhere from 15 to 40€.

If you take into account the thousand of bounced checks during the crisis years in Greece you can imagine the sums accrued by banks with these “stamping fees„. So the banks has created for itself an incentive to issue check books to not creditworthy customers.

It seems capitalism can always find a way to turn crisis to opportunity.