{"id":1453,"date":"2018-08-13T03:46:23","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T03:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=1453"},"modified":"2018-08-13T03:46:23","modified_gmt":"2018-08-13T03:46:23","slug":"greek-banks-face-higher-costs-post-bailout-as-ecb-ends-waiver-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=1453","title":{"rendered":"Greek banks face higher costs post-bailout as ECB ends waiver"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"subtitel col-lg-12\">\n<p>Bloomberg\/Athens<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Greek lenders face higher financing costs after the European Central Bank said it will stop accepting the country\u2019s government debt as collateral from August 21, the day after the nation\u2019s bailout programme ends.<br \/>\nThe ECB will remove a waiver exempting Greek bonds from a rule that all collateral must be investment grade. The exemption was conditional on Greece being compliant with an aid programme.<br \/>\nWith Greek debt rated below investment grade by all rating companies, banks will have to replace as much as \u20ac3.5bn ($4bn) of their liquidity with more expensive facilities, according to a person familiar with the matter.<br \/>\nThe expectation is that lenders will turn to the interbank market and to the Greek central bank\u2019s Emergency Liquidity Assistance, the person said, asking not to be named because the information is confidential. Greek ELA carries an interest rate 1.5 percentage points higher than the ECB\u2019s main refinancing rate, which is currently at zero.<br \/>\n\u201cThe Governing Council has decided that from 21 August 2018, the Eurosystem\u2019s standard criteria and credit quality thresholds should apply in respect of marketable debt instruments issued or fully guaranteed by the Hellenic Republic,\u201d an ECB statement said.<br \/>\nGreece is trying to stand on its own feet again after a decade of financial crises, more than \u20ac300bn in aid commitments from the euro area and International Monetary Fund. It remains Europe\u2019s most indebted country though, and the economy is still struggling to recover from losing more than a quarter of its output.<br \/>\nYields on Greek bonds are rising again, with the 10-year note at about 4.2%, the highest since June 21 when euro-area finance ministers agreed on further debt-relief measures.<br \/>\nThe ECB\u2019s waiver had been in place since June 2016. An earlier exemption was suspended in February 2015 when the newly elected government said it wouldn\u2019t meet the terms of the bailout program it inherited. The political wrangling that year almost saw Greece forced out of the currency bloc.<br \/>\nBank of Greece governor Yannis Stournaras had repeatedly called for the government to apply for a precautionary credit line after the bailout. That could have allowed the waiver to be extended, and may have helped Greece gain access to the ECB\u2019s quantitative-easing programme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bloomberg\/Athens Greek lenders face higher financing costs after the European Central Bank said it will stop accepting the country\u2019s government debt as collateral from August 21, the day after the nation\u2019s bailout&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,57,90,96,107,137,139,160,174,184,201,202,209,232,233,244,246,249,256,267,277,279,288],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aramco","tag-baroudi","tag-democracy","tag-doha","tag-embargo","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-international-maritime-disputes","tag-lebanon","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-opec","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-saudi","tag-straddling-hydrocarbons-reserves","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}