Stournaras: Greece plans to relax capital controls in future

Target to limit red loans by 40% in 2019, he says

Bank of Greece governor Yiannis Stournaras told German newspaper ‘Handelsblatt’ that Greece was planning relaxing capital controls in the future. Stournaras underlined that the Greek banking institutions were stable, while their indicators demonstrated they had over 16% capital adequacy, one of the largest in the whole of the Eurozone. ‘We want to give people incentives to place their money from under their ‘matrices’ in the banks’, he said. Stournaras added that he saw no reason for further capitalisation, while he warned that a credit event still posed the greatest risk for the Greek banks in reference to the 45.2% non performing loans. The head of the Greek central bank said the goal was to limit non performing loans on Greek bank sheets by 40% in 2019, meaning a reduction from 100bln Euros to 60bln.