Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will meet with Bank of Greece Gov. Yiannis Stournaras within hours to be briefed on ECB decisions taken during a board of directors’ meeting in Nicosia this week.
The meeting comes hours after ECB president Mario Draghi declined a Greek request to raise the limit (15 billion euro, currently) for the issuance of T-bills, in order to cover part of its fiscal needs.
Draghi nevertheless noted that the ECB has given a credit extension to Athens totaling 100 bln euros, and has doubled lending. Lending is 68% of the Greek GDP, he noted, adding that the ECB is Europe’s Central Bank as well as the Central Bank for each individual member state of the Eurozone. He clarified that a prerequisite to restart Greek funding will be the successful implementation of the program. As things stand, no bonds could be bought by countries in a program, such as Greece and Cyprus.
He underlined that if the country repays the bonds in the ECB’s possession, the whole issue can be re-examined.
On Wednesday, following a phone conversation between Tsipras and Stournaras, the Greek PM expressed confidence that the BoG governor will use all the right “tools” to fully restore financing for the Greek economy.
