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THE RISK OF a disorderly Greek eurozone exit has receded substantially, Greece’s central banker said today as he urged for the aggressive pursuit of pending structural reforms.
“The risk of a Grexit accident has been drastically reduced,” Bank of Greece governor George Provopoulos said in an interview to AFP, whilst noting progress on reforms which is enabling the country to enter a “virtuous circle”.
Provopoulos, 62, called for a “more aggressive” implementation of structural reforms tied to billions of euros in EU-IMF bailout aid.
“We have quite a long agenda of things to do, regarding privatisations, reform in the product and services market, improving the tax collecting mechanism which has a number of weaknesses and so on,” Provopoulos said.
He noted that in the first phase of the programme “although the country placed emphasis on fiscal consolidation, on structural reforms the efforts were quite incomplete,” he said. “As a result, the GDP reduction was much higher than initially anticipated.”
Senior auditors from the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are returning to Greece later this month to gauge the progress of reforms.
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Strikes and protests
Their report will determine whether Greece will access a scheduled slice of €2.8 billion from its international creditors due later this month.
Greece is trying to emerge from a six-year recession that has brought layoffs and public budget cuts to hundreds of thousands of Greek households.
European Union leaders agreed in December to give Greece €49.1 billion in return for additional austerity measures, breaking a six-month stalemate.
But the European Commission warned at the time that “very large” implementation risks remained.
The fiscal overhaul has sparked waves of strikes and protests, many of them violent. Another general strike has been called by unions for February 20.
But economic indicators have improved since June, when the country emerged from a period of political uncertainty capped by back-to-back elections before a coalition government could be formed.
They played well, 110 billion euro written off, Spains banks directly recapitalised! not loaded onto future generations. I didn’t hear their politicians and other gullible fools singing about inflation eroding the debt in 100 years!
I suppose they all asked.
While today our governmant will ask TD’s to WELCOME our debt arrangements. ..
Barry, let me be clearer for you, apples & oranges, they played well for the position they were in, they could be in the same shit storm with an extra 110 billion owed pushed out over 100 or so years.. inflation would be an even better argument for eroding debt over that time period..
We could have played the illegality card and supported David Hall’s case instead of suspiciously forcing it through on the eve of supreme court challenge based on a so called leak. Noonan stated quite clearly that prom notes were illegal on Pat Kenny!!
This was all rushed through due to David Hall’s challenge as im sure time will tell..
@ Barry I agree that Greece and its people are being ground into the floor because of the write down they got but surely it isn’t beyond the remit of Michael Noonan to at least pursue a partial write down of this country’s banking debt. We’re being told to carry the debts of private institutions when we had very little to do with creating that debt.
We did effectively get a write down, in the only legal way possible in 2013. Look at the NPVs of the promissory notes v new bonds, in today’s money we will pay at least 8bn less. The option to pay nothing disappeared in 2008
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