ATHENS | By Macropolis | Greece is due to raise the subject of further debt relief at Monday’s Eurogroup but with the official sector poised to take a hit this time as opposed to the Private Sector Involvement (PSI) of early 2012. Monday’s is the first meeting of eurozone finance ministers since Eurorstat ratified Greece’s 2013 primary surplus and the last before European Parliament (EP) elections will be held in Brussels today.
ATHENS | By Macropolis | Greece’s 2013 general government (gg) deficit reached 23.11 billion euros (12.7 percent of GDP), while debt stood at 318.7 billion (175.1 percent of GDP), according to first notification released by the Eurostat on Wednesday.
MADRID | By The Corner | After years of painful restructuring and international bashing, Greek bond yields at 4-year low ahead of auction.
ATHENS | By Jens Bastian via Macropolis | In the future we may look back on the past two weeks as a watershed moment for Greek banks following the onset of the twin financial and sovereign debt crisis in 2009. After extensive and well prepared international road shows, financial institutions in Athens attracted unprecedented levels of foreign investors’ interest for bond placements and capital-raising initiatives.
ATHENS | Yanis Varoufakis via TrumanFactor | Why an independent Scotland should get out of sterling, but Greece should not volunteer to exit the Eurozone? Scotland should state its intention to decouple from sterling, once independent, rather than petitioning for a continuation of its subservient role in an asymmetrical sterling union. But if this is good advice for Scotland, why am I arguing that Greece should not sever its links with the even more odious monetary union known as the Eurozone? Unless the two cases differ, my argument lacks consistency. But they do differ. Fundamentally too.
ATHENS | By Nick Maltkouzis | The social cost of the crisis in Greece is often hidden from visitors and casual observers. In fact if one excludes some parts of Athens and other big cities, the signs of the crisis are not always that visible. However, an increasing amount of Greeks are finding themselves socially excluded. According to the latest figures from the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), 34.6 percent of the population was considered to be living at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2012, the highest proportion in the European Unión.
ATHENS | Op-ed by MacroPolis | [NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: This article was published ahead of Troika officials’ meeting with Bank of Greece (BoG) governor Giorgos Provopoulos on Wednesday]. As local lenders’ capital needs have shot to the top of the agenda in the current round of talks between Greece and its lenders and ahead of the troika’s arrival on Monday, it had been widely reported that Greek banks would need no more than 6 billion euros. However, there is now speculation that the troika believes this figure will be much higher. Here is our take on how this disagreement came about and what the outcome might be.
ATHENS | By MacroPolis | Following a meeting last week between Bank of Greece (BoG) senior officials with the top management of the four Greek systemic banks (Alpha, Eurobank, National and Piraeus), where the central bank reportedly informed lenders that their capital needs amount to around 5 billion euros, a Financial Times report published on Monday puts things in a completely different perspective.
FRANKFURT | By Lidia Conde | German people continue feeling they have to suffer the consequences of Greeces’s mistakes when figures say that Greek are twice as rich as they are as regards housing ownership. They want to help their southern neighbours with something else than money: economy and finance know-how to ease them of the severe adjustments derived from crisis.
ATHENS | Op-ed via Macropolis | A Council of State ruling in January looks to have blown a 500-million-euro hole in the government’s fiscal plans. Now a Supreme Court verdict is threatening to create an even bigger shortfall in Greece’s public finances: the emergency property tax introduced in 2011 and levied through electricity bills was unconstitutional.