Greece is
locked in negotiations with international creditors as the country races
against the clock to avert a default as early as this month.
.jpg)
“They’re
working hard now and that’s what we’ve gained,” Dutch Finance Minister and
Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters in the Hague. “But in
the end we only look at the results and we’re not that far yet.”
Greek Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras told his cabinet on Thursday he’s confident of closing
a deal, even as his government sent conflicting signals on its willingness to
agree on reforms required under the 240 billion-euro ($268 billion) bailout.
Faced with debt payments totaling about 1 billion euros to the International
Monetary Fund on May 6 and May 12, Greece hopes there will be enough progress
in the talks by next week to allow the European Central Bank to restore
liquidity access for the country’s cash-strapped banks.
Optimism
that a deal to unlock financial aid for Greece is near after months of talks
put the country’s assets among the region’s best performers in April. The
Athens Stock Exchange Index of shares jumped the most by the end of April since
September 2012 from a two-year low on April 21. It ended up 6.1 percent in
April, the biggest rally in western Europe. Bonds returned 13 percent, as
securities across the region fell.
Optimistic Assumptions
Greece and
its creditors stepped up efforts to break the impasse with a target to reach a
deal by Sunday, three people with knowledge of the talks said earlier this
week.
“One thing
from the history of the euro crisis that we know is that all of these deadlines
can shift, but if there is an actual deadline they will make a decision
beforehand,” Christian Schulz, an economist at Berenberg Bank, said in a Bloomberg
TV interview on Friday. “They’re still miles apart on pretty much everything.”
Dijsselbloem
said it was too early to say whether talks with Greece had reached a turning
point. While there has been progress in terms of the process after Tsipras
reshuffled the negotiating team, pushing aside Finance Minister Yanis
Varoufakis, there is still a long way to go on the substance, a person familiar
with the matter said, asking not to be named because the talks are private.
The
official said that the Greek government’s economic assumptions are very
optimistic, making it difficult to agree on the extent of fiscal adjustment
measures the country must adopt to meet goals under its bailout.
The Greek
government’s assumptions for deficit, debt and revenue are based on a growth
forecast of 1.4% for 2015. The Commission is expected to lower its current
forecast of 2.5% to well below the government’s estimate when it issues its
spring forecasts on May 5, the official said.
Stumbling Blocks
An
agreement with creditors could still meet opposition within Tsipras’s
government. Varoufakis said on Thursday that Greece wouldn’t discuss pension
cuts or a sales-tax increase as part of the current talks, although he
indicated that any pension reform could be part of a broader agreement in June.
In a sign
that the government may be ready to ease its stance against certain reforms, it
plans to invite investors to buy a stake in the country’s main port of Piraeus
on May 6, the same day the ECB may discuss the collateral it accepts from Greek
banks in return for emergency funding. Greece will proceed this year with the
sale or leasing of stakes in several strategic assets, including Piraeus Port
Authority SA and 14 regional airports, according to Greek officials with direct
knowledge of the matter.
“These
steps appear positive, but the real stumbling blocks such as labor market and
pension reforms demanded by the creditors still need to be surmounted,” UBS
analysts Ricardo Garcia-Schildknecht and Thomas Wacker, who see Greek default
risk probability at 50-60 percent, wrote in a note to clients. “We therefore have
difficulty seeing how the Eurogroup can unlock the bailout funding under these
circumstances.” -- Bloomberg
(Πηγή:
bworldonline.com)
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου