Four of Greec’s biggest banks got a rejuvenate blood trnasfusion with a financial injection of 18 billion euro by the European Financial Stability Fund. Of course, when the Titanic sinks, bankers are the ones to be saved first.
“Greece handed 18 billion euros ($22.6 billion) to its four biggest banks on Monday, an official said, allowing the stricken lenders to regain access to European Central Bank funding.
The long-awaited injection – via bonds from the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund – will boost the nearly depleted capital base of National Bank, Alpha, Eurobank and Piraeus Bank.
“The funds have been disbursed,” an official at the Hellenic Financial Stability Facility, who declined to be named, told Reuters. The HFSF was set up to funnel funds from Greece’s bailout programme to recapitalise its tottering banks.
The HFSF allocated 6.9 billion euros to National Bank, 1.9 billion to Alpha, 4.2 billion to Eurobank and 5 billion to Piraeus. All four are scheduled to report first-quarter earnings this week.
The news came as two government officials told Reuters that near-bankrupt Greece could access 3 billion euros, left from its first bailout programme, to cover basic state payments if efforts to revive falling tax revenue fail.”(Further Reading REUTERS)
It is not clear whether even a slight part of this money will be forwarded to cash-short and recession-hit businesses and enterprises…. with low interest rates.
Even if it is a ‘commitment to help’ establish a pro-bailout government after June 17 elections.
My wife made deposit at Alpha Bank this morning. Never dreamt it would make the news! But I assure everybody that it was not even close to 18 billion euro. 😉
Low rates don’t interest me. I would have gladly paid high rates if only one bank would have given my business a loan. But they didn’t and they won’t.
Yeah, that’s exactly the problem. No credits for small businesses. And, according to the news, it’s the same in the UK and the US, despite all those “quantitative easing” programs. All those billions are only used by the banks for speculations, not for fueling the real economy. This madness has to be stopped! Credits for businesses that sell real goods, not just “innovative financial prodcucts”!
Yes, healthy businesses are run into the ground because of this in the last one or two years. And more and more money is poured into a banking system that has failed us all.
“I would have gladly paid high rates if only one bank would have given my business a loan. But they didn’t and they won’t.”
In my “other” home country I had a thriving business, turnover around the 2,000,000€ at some stage. We had an idea for expansion, and went to our bank of 21 years. They suggested a feasibility study, and put us in touch with a company specializing in these things. They even provided a 100% loan to pay for this study, 56,000€, with plenty of assurances that all was well, this was just protocol. 4 months later, and 56,000€ poorer, the study was ready, and gave glowing recommendations for what we had planned. However, the amount of money needed to implement the plan was more than the local manager could sanction, and he had to refer the whole thing to headquarters. They shot it down.
I later found out that the company that did the study was owned by the bank manager’s sister, and fronted by her daughter under her married name. Bottomline, he gave his sister 56,000€, it took me 4 years to pay that off, and I have nothing to show for it but a useless report with a fancy cover.
Moral of the story, be careful what you wish for, and how much you would pay to get it…
Now I REALLY want to know what your “other home country” is!
Other moral of your story: nothing that happens here in Greece is unique. It has been done and is done in a lot of countries one would never suspect.
I have similar real-life stories about Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. Not in banking but other businesses and public services.
Still I would have gladly payed one time a high amount to get a deal pre-invested. Now my Greek business is closed and I opened it in another EU-country. Because I can not afford it any longer to waist every cent I earn on the nomenklatura here. But that’s being an entrepeneur: taking risks and living with the consequences and finding other ways in other places to start all over again. 🙂
Well, the other home country is where a bank manager can write himself 127 million € worth of unsecured loans, where the same bank can give an unsecured loan of 500 million € to one client to enable him to buy shares in the same bank, where another bank manager can create a 27€ million pension fund for himself and can cook the books with the help of his mates in the first bank. It’s the country were the prime minister can go on TV to tell the people they are living “way above their means” and need to tighten the belt, while wearing a shirt costing then £700 (seven hundred yes) paid for by the state, where a minister for finance can decide to give the banks a blanket guarantee for everything, crooked dealings and all, and stone faced declare it is the cheapest bank bailout in history, where another minister for finance can be minister for 8 years and happily declare in court that he never had a bank account to pay his 161,000€ or so ministerial wages into, where the same guy becomes prime minister and happily declares in court that all that dodgy money actually came from a whip-around by his friends when he “was down on his luck” (a few million mind you!), and the rest was won on betting on the horses, where the major political party ruling the country for years would go to the national horse races in in my home town and literally set up a tent where “interested parties” would come and hand over “contributions” accompanied by a wishlist, where crooked business men can go across the sea to the UK and get a UK bankrupcy exonerating them of debts of billions, where a guy can sell a complete block of flats at €350,000 each, with not 1 flat comforming with even the most basic safety regulations, where the people who bought these flats have been put out of them by the municipality but are not entitled to 1 cent compensation because the builder got a UK bancruptcy, where a minister for health declares is public that teenage girls get pregnant so they can get child benefit, where religious orders have been found to harbour many peadofiles and deliberatly twart any legal action against those animals, where a guy gets 6 years jail for falsly declaring imported garlic as “apples”, where crime bosses run their empires from inside the jails, using mobile phones, where multinationals set up European headquarters in the International Financial Centre and perform 3 hat tricks to avoid paying millions of taxes, and where Joe Soap is being nailed to the wall with “austerity” measures. Sound familiar. It’s also a bailout country by the way…
WOW! I am really impressed! Excellent report. I didn’t know all these …details. Neither seen on any TV report.thanks a lot.
This sounds like The Netherlands… except for the horse races of course. And there they don’t need to go to the UK to get a fraudulent bankruptcy. 😆
But one day I hope to have the chance to visit ‘your’ green and pleasant pastures, so beautiful to photograph. Retracing the steps of Leopold Bloom and finally see what the last novel I ever read, Finnegans Wake,
was all about. And not forget, to enjoy some of the brewed stuff in large glasses. 😉
yes, there is that too 🙂