The immediate problem: the entire country of Greece is about to go bankrupt. They've got overly generous pensions and benefits, they've displayed a seemingly petulant unwillingness to consider belt-tightening, and their government sector is veritably Italian in its efficiency and size. This is not the stuff that long-term economic health is made of.
The bigger problem: Greece is part of the Eurozone and, while its long been kind of funny to refer to them as the "honorary member," the other 15 countries who share the Euro aren't amused. The bankruptcy of any individual state would tank the shared currency, cascading across the continent in ways that are totally unpredictable (the upshot of a disaster which was never even a consideration when the Eurozone was formed). If it did happen, most of what we've thought about travel for the last decade—dollar vs. Euro, the long-term stability of the EU, frictionless travel across Europe, etc—would quickly have to be revised.
The alternative is for the rest of the Eurozone countries to bail out Athens, allowing them to service their sovereign debt and avoid default. But the bigger European countries - Germany in particular - don't see why they should have to suffer just because the Greek language doesn't have a translation for "fiscal responsibility." Some Germans are even calling for Greece to be kicked out the Eurozone altogether.
Is it going to happen? Tough to say. The Eurozone is a political as well as economic pact, and the symbolism of a Eurozone drift is something that political leaders want to avoid. That said, it's also an economic pact, requiring a certain level of discipline from each member, and the Greeks have not exactly been holding up their end of the bargain.
But back on the political point. The Eurozone isn't something you lightly abandon. There's a treaty and stuff. Throwing Greece under the bus would make people feel less than sanguine about Europe's future stability. Individual European nations are definitely suffering. But the whole point of having a single European entity is that European citizens weren't supposed to think in those terms any more. Plus kicking Greece out will take time, with the Euro bleeding every day they're still in the market. So yeah, there's going to be a bail out one way or another.
Regardless, this fracas is another reminder that we're just at the beginning of debt-driven global economic turmoil. There are trillions of dollars of bad debt hidden in various countries, threatening to very quickly disrupt and very jarringly change everything. The economic collapse or political breakup of the Eurozone is one possibility. A Chinese economic decline, with all that it portends for Asia and the US, is another. We're still climbing out of the hole here in the United States, and no one knows how long that's going to take.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: traveling is going to change over the next half-decade in ways no one can predict, and in the meantime we'd advise against gambling on currency unless you're very, very brave.
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