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This story is brought to you in association with the European Council – Eurogroup Completion of the fourth and final review and growth strategy The Eurogroup commends the Greek authorities for the completion of all the agreed prior actions of the final review of the ESM programme. We congratulate the Greek authorities and Greek people […]
The Finance ministers of the Eurozone met yesterday in Brussels to discuss mainly on the implementation of Greece’s ESM economic adjustment programme and have come to a final deal which will lead to the conclusion of the first review unlocking the second tranche of 10,3 billion euros. The Ministers gave a direct assignment to the […]
The teleconference of the EuroWorking Group which took place yesterday is the forerunner of the extraordinary meeting of the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone on May 9 where Greece’s programme review is about to be discussed. The outcome was, as expected, disappointing regarding the agreement between the two sides on the package of basic and […]
Eurozone’s Finance Ministers convened in Luxemburg two days ago and proposed that Greece should immediately focus on the necessary reforms in order to be able to cope with the third bailout programme. Both sides (creditors and Greece) agreed that Greece will have to implement the 48 prerequisites- measures that will unlock the next much needed tranche […]
Last Saturday, 12 September, Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis made some remarks after the informal meeting of ECOFIN (the EU ministers of Finance Council) in Luxembourg. The main item on the agenda was about completing the European Monetary Union. EMU is the most important EU project after the introduction of the single euro currency. He […]
After a very long session that lasted nearly 25 hours, the Greek government through 222 MP’s said a clear YES to the terms of the third bailout agreement. This strong positive vote provided to Euclid Tsakalotos, the Greek Finance Minister, the necessary tools to seal the deal with his counterparts, which realized late last night at […]
The Greek indecisiveness and procrastination and the deep division of the euro area countries, with Germany upholding an intransigent position have led to the humiliation of Athens, during the Saturday and Sunday late night meetings of the Eurogroup (the council of the 19 ministers of Eurozone) and the Eurosummit (the 19 heads of Eurozone state […]
The technical teams of the European institutions are now discussing the Greek proposal which was approved yesterday evening by SYRIZA’s governmental council and submitted to the institutions minutes before the deadline in order to have a final agreement at tomorrow’s Eurogroup. The fact that the Greek government has come up with a more professional and […]
Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, his government and their depressed country are now in real dire straits. This is a much worse position than in any time during the last five years, a period in which Greece repeatedly faced total collapse and was rescued by a troika of creditors (the European Union, the European […]
The deadline of the 4-month extension that the Greek government had received on February 20 just expired today. However, the Greek government and particularly the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on a last moment decision to return to the negotiating table sent a letter to the institutions only hours before the expiration of the bailout programme. […]
Today’s Eurogroup summit of the 19 euro area heads of state and government is convened by Donald Tusk, the President of European Council in order to bluntly present Alexis Tsipras, the Greek PM with a final ultimatum; ‘comply or leave the Eurozone’. Of course this initiative was not Tusk’s, given that his mandate is rather […]
The next meeting of the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone (Eurogroup) is convening tomorrow and the main topic will be the Greek deal with the three institutions. However, the fact that the negotiations haven’t yet reached an accord from both sides makes the agreement very unlikely. That is the reason why the European leaders are preparing […]
Greece is running out not only of time but also luck. The country’s economy has been pending in limbo for the past four months, exhausting all its resources to survive the financial suffocation that the European Central Bank has imposed following the political orders by Berlin, Paris and Brussels, violating the bank’s “independent” role in the European […]
The Greek government found a very last-minute solution to pay its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that was only due yesterday. However, it was last Thursday when Yanis Varoufakis was appearing to be optimistic about Greece’s situation and the overall negotiations with its creditors while attending the European Business Summit (EBS) 2015 where the […]
The move by Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, to reshuffle its negotiating team will certainly ease the tense in Brussels but is not going to bring the desired deal. The main thorns for unlocking the next tranche are the “red lines” of the Greek government and its anti-austerity policy. Greece is struggling to pay wages […]
Today is the day that Alexis Tsipras meets Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss about business and trade under a spiritual Easter atmosphere for the “Orthodox brothers”. The date of this summit was strategically decided to be this week, in order to put some pressure, at least this is what the Greeks believe, to the European leaders-creditors who […]
It has been one long month since the Greek deal on the Eurogroup of 20 February where Greece and the rest of the Eurozone agreed to give to the former a four-month extension of the loan agreement. However, the Greek government does not seem to cooperate with the three institutions (ECB, IMF, EU) to actively and urgently […]
Even without having spent yet a single euro the European Central Bank’s program of sovereign bond buying of €60 billion a month has had an enormous impact on world financial markets. It suppressed the euro dollar parity from the unbearably high levels of 2014 (1.39 on 9 March 2014) to 1.08510 last Friday, the lowest […]
In the efforts to solve the latest Greek enigma, the European Central Bank has once more proved that when it comes to what matters more in the EU, the Eurozone, it constitutes the power house of the entire European edifice. The ECB emerges imbued by truly pan-European motives in serving the Union project. When the […]
The frantic search of the Greek government – pressed at home by an accelerating bank run which culminated last Friday with €1 billion withdrawals in a few hours – to achieve an agreement with its Eurozone partners ended up in an almost total retreat of Athens in front of its creditors. The Greek minister of […]
Today everyone’s eyes are fixed on the extraordinary Eurogroup meeting which is taking place in Brussels. This is simply put one of the most important gatherings in the Union’s history because one of its member states is under the “dilemma” of staying within the Eurozone by signing an extension agreement or exit and face imminent bankruptcy. […]
After Wednesday’s Eurogroup where Greece’s Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, “agreed to disagree” with his European counterparts, Grexit enthusiasts had a reason to celebrate in the evening. However, they did not count for the modern Hercules, Alexis Tsipras, who came tieless to his first EU Summit yesterday in Brussels but with plenty and trendy new […]
The world community will be watching very closely today’s gathering of the 28 leaders of the European Union in Brussels. The reason is that its agenda includes two crucial issues; the economic fate of Greece and a discussion on the outcome of a conference in Minsk, Belarus for the future of Ukraine. Yesterday afternoon both […]
Today in Strasbourg the three EU decision making bodies, the Council as represented by its Greek Presidency, the Parliament and the Commission, in a procedure called ‘trilogue’ will try to bridge their differences and come up with a ground breaking agreement to complete the European Banking Union. This is the most important project enterprised by […]
Yesterday’s Eurogroup and today’s ECOFIN councils are convened almost exclusively to discuss the details of the two remaining gaps in the legal and of course the operating framework of the European Banking Union, which are, the Single Resolution Mechanism and the Resolution Fund. The two legislative bodies of the European Union, the Parliament and the […]
The absolute necessity to conclude before May the trilateral negotiations on the functioning of the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) for failing banks and clarify the role of the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) (in relation to the control and the use of the Single Resolution Fund), united yesterday all the representatives of three decision-making bodies of the […]
The importance of the Single Resolution Fund, which is supposed to bear the cost of Eurozone’s failing banks, was underlined yesterday evening by the fact that the President of Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch minister of Finance, baptized the group of people who will govern the function of the SRF as Eurogroup+. The Eurogroup is […]
Reading two accounts by two different people, about what happened in the Eurogroup meeting yesterday in Brussels, gives a clear indication of what will be decided in the ECOFIN Council today. Ollie Rehn, Vice-President of the European Commission and member of the Commission responsible for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro, and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, […]
It was not by accident that the President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi chose the right time to ring the danger bell against a “bad Banking Union”, while speaking yesterday in the Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament. Obviously, he wanted to be heard by the new German government which is expected […]
Yesterday’s Eurogroup was devoted rather to the…IMF than to the burning issues of Eurozone, like bank recovery and resolution and deposit guarantee schemes. Probably the reason for this change was that Reza Moghadam, the IMF’s European Department director, was present and his main criticism of Eurozone’s economy was that it suffers from “weak banks and over-indebted […]
Last week in Brussels, an unseen before procedure took place, during last Friday’s Eurogroup of the 17 euro area member states council of Finance ministers. The 17 politicians assessed the Commission‘s opinions on member states’ draft budgets, ahead of those draft budgetary exercises been discussed in national Parliaments. This is the EU’s ‘brave’ new economic […]
Yesterday EU Commissioner Michel Barnier, in an interview to the German financial newspaper ‘Handelsblatt’, said that the European Commission has decided to go ahead and propose legislation to safeguard Eurozone’s banking system, along the lines of the recommendations of the high-level expert group, chaired by Erkki Liikanen, governor of the Bank of Finland. The main […]
Last Friday the ECOFIN council made up by the 28 EU ministers of finance, confirmed that a permanent arrangement for the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) and the single resolution fund (SRF) meant to deal with failing banks, will be agreed on before the end of the year covering the period after 1 January 2015. In […]
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