Content about European Central Bank

“In the June election the Greek voters will choose to either remain in the euro area or exit from it”, the British Prime Minister David Cameron said from the United States, where he is attending the G8 and the NATO summits.

The Ecofin council of the European Union, comprising the 27 ministers of finance have approved a huge package of new rules regulating the business environment in which operate 8,300 banks.

With the dignitaries in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Washington having already termed the next Greek legislative election a referendum, with one question to be answered by voters 'stay or leave the Eurozone', Greek citizens continue to be bewildered.

As a pious child, I was terrified of mortal sins. Every Monday morning, a giant schoolteacher enquired whether we had gone to church the previous day. If anyone admitted a failure to attend mass, our sadistic educator would conjure up images of a soul being blackened. Hell beckoned.

There is a new commandment that must be obeyed: thou shalt not criticise the European Central Bank.

The European Commission post-programme surveillance (PPS) mission to Latvia started on 7 May and will last until 11 May. On 20 January the three-year financial support programme with the EU was finished and the surveillance with the IMF, the World Bank and the European Central Bank will take place twice a year until a large portion of the loan provided to Latvia will be repaid.

Whatever the outcome of the French and the Greek elections on 6 May, the Eurozone will never be the same as before. In both those elections there will be a  message sent also to Brussels and Berlin, and even Washington and New York as well. In some respects on election night, Athens may emit a much louder and clearer braodcast than Paris.

After the governing council of the European Central Bank, which took place in Barcelona on 3 May, which kept the basic interest rate unchanged at 1%, its governor Mario Draghi said the bank has done its best in terms of supplying stimulus finance to the Euro system.

After two days of meetings and bilateral negotiations, politicians and central bankers in the Spring joint conferences of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank concluded that all their efforts to save the Eurozone and the world from the worst will be tested in the market, over the coming weeks and months.

It seems that a general election is the worst enemy for any country’s economic rehabilitation programme after a crisis, like the one Greece is applying now, on instructions from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (this is the famous Memorandum of Understanding between Athens and the troika of EU-ECB-IMF).

As expected, the European Central Bank kept its Interest rates unchanged.

In a short announcement the ECB said, “At today’s meeting (4 April) the Governing Council of the ECB decided that the interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 1.00%, 1.75% and 0.25% respectively”.

Peter Bofinger, the well known German economist and prominent member of the prestigious Council of Economic  Experts, which advises the Berlin government and Parliament on economic policy issues, said this week that he expects Greece to undergo a new rearrangement of its sovereign debt not later that this summer.

It was a rather awkward statement by someone who is well aware, if not deeply implicated in planning the current rearrangement of the Greek debt, which is still in progress on its foreign law bonds segment.