Greece’s Minister of Economy and Finance Yiannis Papathanasiou was in Brussels last week to attend meetings and seminars of his peers and financial analysts and economists to explain how their countries are handling the recession and find ways out of it. Disputing the assertion of one moderator that Greece is suffering from social disharmony because of its economic state, he said Greece’s banks were not as hard hit as others in the EU by the US-started sub-prime mortgage crisis. Greece’s deficit is at five percent of GDP, well above the three percent ceiling set by the European Union, but he said the country is coming out of the doldrums and will recover. After a breakfast meeting with journalists, he stopped to talk to New Europe’s television arm and Andy Dabilis of NEtv about the problems.

We just heard from the ecofin ministers inside how to deal with the problem, and you correctly mentioned the problem of the psychological aspects of dealing with this. Is that feeding into the fear of when we’ll rebound?

Nobody knows exactly, that’s the truth. However, what I mentioned its psychological path is also very important, depending also on the mentality of people, so I believe that, everybody knows and has to know exactly, how important the crisis is, and I believe we also have to be optimistic that things will change and that there is definitely a date when things will change.

Well this is a problem not unique to Greece but the banks have been recapitalised with scores of billions of Euro; for the most part they haven’t lent it, they’ve put it in their vaults. Can’t you force them to lend this money to businesses and consumers? And, why not? Shouldn’t that be part of the regulations? You can’t kick-start the economy if people won’t spend.

Although the problems of the banks are not similar in all countries, for example, we in Greece don’t’ have banks with toxic products. But we have the same problem that the internal market is not operating properly that money is not going into the real economy, is not floating with the speed that we would like and I think this is a general problem all over the world and that is why all the stimulus programmes, and all the programmes in order to guarantee loans is one of the major concerns in all countries.

If Greece doesn’t have a problem with the banks then why did you give them 28 billion Euro?

Look, because the intrabank market does not operate and because we want to guarantee that the money is not to help the banks, we want it to help the real economy and the families, to borrow in order to continue to buy houses or to continue their businesses. So we guarantee that in order to save and help the real economy.

One final question then, is there any way now, as it’s clear we need to regulate the banks beyond that, for example it’s clear that not regulating them is like letting EU telecoms set their own roaming rates.

I think that one of the things we learnt out of this crisis is that we have to reorganize the regulation and we have to review the regulation and I think that all countries agree that we have to have new rule and we have to regulate now what was left before completely free. This is now one of the major lessons we have been taught in order not to have the same problems.