Greece

Will Irish & Portuguese bailouts get Greek treatment?

February 25, 2013 1:01 pm by Peter Spiegel

Finance ministers MIchael Noonan of Ireland, center, and Vito Gaspar of Portugal, right, with the EU's Olli Rehn at January's meeting.

After Greece last year won a restructuring of its €172bn rescue that included an extension of the time Athens has to pay off its bailout loans, Ireland and Portugal decided they should get a piece of the action, too.

So at the January meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels, both Dublin and Lisbon made a formal request: they’d also like more time to pay off their bailout loans. According to a seven-page analysis prepared for EU finance ministry officials a few weeks ago, though, the prospect is not as straight forward as it may seem.

The document – obtained by the Brussels Blog under the condition that we not post it on the blog – makes pretty clear that while an extension might help smooth “redemption humps” that now exist for Ireland (lots of loans and bonds come due in 2019 and 2020) and Portugal (2016 and 2021), it’s not a slam dunk case. Read more

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Posted in EU, Euro, Greece, Ireland |

Are S&P and EU headed for eurozone reconciliation?

February 5, 2013 12:03 pm by Peter Spiegel

Over the course of the eurozone crisis, the relationship between EU leaders and credit-rating agencies has been, at best, a love-hate one, with officials frequently lashing out at the three major sovereign raters for the timing and severity of their downgrades.

So it was probably with some Schadenfreude that those same officials learned of the news that the US Justice Department will soon file a civil suit against Standard & Poor’s – arguably the most prominent of the rating agencies – for misleading investors when it gave gold-plated endorsements to US mortgage-related securities before the 2008 financial crisis.

But what happens when S&P starts pointing out that some of the most criticised eurozone policies – the austerity measures aimed at forcing internal devaluations in struggling peripheral countries – may be working? The silence thus far has been deafening. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Greece, Ireland |

Is Grexit dead? The IMF seems to think not.

January 21, 2013 11:52 am by Peter Spiegel

Greek prime minister Samaras takes questions after last month's EU summit in Brussels.

When eurozone leaders finally reached agreement on an overhauled €173bn bailout of Greece last month, Antonis Samaras, the Greek prime minister, declared the prospect of his country leaving the euro to be over: “Solidarity in our union is alive; Grexit is dead.”

But late on Friday, someone decided to resurrect it: the International Monetary Fund. In its first report on the Greek bailout since last month’s deal, the IMF was unexpectedly explicit on the risks that Greece still faces, including the potential for full-scale default and euro exit.

In fact, the 260-page report includes a three-page box explicitly dedicated to examining the fallout if Greece were to be forced out of the euro, which we’ve posted here. The box, titled “Greece as a Source of Contagion”, concludes that while the eurozone has improved its defences, it still remains hugely vulnerable to shocks that would come following Grexit. Read more

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Posted in Greece |

New Greek bailout: the leaked chart

November 28, 2012 10:41 am by Peter Spiegel

IMF chief Christine Lagarde arrives at Monday's eurogroup meeting where Greek deal was struck.

When eurozone finance minsters announced their long-delayed deal to overhaul Greece’s second bailout early Tuesday morning, there was much they didn’t disclose.

The most glaring was how big a highly-touted bond buyback programme would be, a question dodged repeatedly at a post-deal news conference. But there were other things that were left out of a two-page statement summing up the deal, including how much the European Central Bank was making on its Greek bond holdings, profits that will be returned to Athens as part of the agreement.

It turns out, those were not the only – or even the biggest – unanswered questions left after the early-morning deal. As we report in today’s dead-tree edition of the FT, ministers failed to find enough debt relief measures to get to the purported Greek debt target of 124 per cent of economic output by 2020, far above the 120 per cent target set in February.

In reporting our story, we relied heavily on a leaked chart that we got our hands on (which we’ve linked to here) that lays out in great detail the assumptions built into the new programme. A quick review of the chart comes after the jump… Read more

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Posted in EU, Euro, Greece |