Tagged ECB

In a bid to boost morale and ease the financial squeeze on Greek citizens, banks reopened on Monday, 20 July, after being closed for 3 weeks. Though banks are fully operational, withdrawals will still be capped at €60 per day, but now with the possibility to withdraw a whole week’s worth in one go. Restrictions on overseas payments remain in place. Also, trading on the Athens Stock Exchange is still frozen, along with clearing services and cash settlements for Greek securities.

On 18 March 2015 the European Central Bank inaugurated its new, glittering headquarters building in Frankfurt, at a cost of €1.3 billion. Taking issue with this significant expense at a time of austerity policies around Europe, and the fact that the original budget for the building had been set at €500 million, a Member of the European Parliament submitted a question to the ECB President, who responded acknowledging significant deviations from the original budget. What would the institutions formerly known as Troika have said if any of these countries had inaugurated premises of such standards recently? Well, in fact this is exactly what has happened.

        Question on the cost of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) submitted by Portuguese MEP Miguel Viegas (GUE/NGL) and response by ECB President Mario Draghi.       Do as I say, not as I do… On 18 March 2015 the European Central Bank inaugurated its new, glittering…

By Panagiota Manoli  and Georgios Maris

Until recently, especially in financial governance issues, studies had paid little attention to the role of the European Parliament (EP), rather focusing on other institutions such as the European Council, the Commission and the European Central Bank. In a chapter that we contributed to a recently published book,* we discuss the role of the EP in the management of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and soon spread into the Eurozone economies.

The European Commission has upped its growth forecasts for the Eurozone and the entire EU after noting the positive effects of the European Central Bank (ECB) debt purchase programme; cheaper oil prices, and the depreciation of the euro. However, this economic improvement will not be uniform across all the member states. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the 19 euro members will be up this year by 1.5%, two tenths higher than estimated in February by the EU executive. For the 28 countries in the European Union, the Commission also revised forecasts upwards by one decimal point to 1.8%

At the Eurogroup meeting on Friday, 24 April, all eyes were on Greece. The embattled Eurozone country got hammered for backtracking on much needed fiscal reforms. Eurogroup officials stated that such measures are vital in helping the Greek government secure its debt repayments. Without the remaining €7.2 billion in the bailout package, Greece will run out of money in a matter of weeks.  The stark warning came as Mr. Varoufakis, Greece’s Finance Minister, tried to calm fears over his country’s ability to raise

The grave mistakes of the European leadership on Greece and the way out of the crisis

citizen-correspondent                                                              By Christos Mouzeviris

Ever since the victory of Syriza and the formation of the current Greek government, the country found itself on the spotlight of the European and global media. Speculations on a potential Grexit, combined with scathing attacks against Syriza’s policies and leadership became common. But is solely Greece, all which is wrong in Europe and the euro-zone? Perhaps the reality is very different if we examine some facts.

  European Central Bank (ECB) President, Mario Draghi, was sprayed with confetti by a woman attending the ECB’s press conference on 15 April 2015 in Frankfurt. The woman ran and jumped onto the desk in front of Mr. Draghi, shouting: “end the ECB dictatorship”. There were no injuries and only a brief interruption to the…

In the European Parliament the head of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) for the Eurozone banks has committed herself to restraining financial institutions and closely monitoring the models they use to calculate risks. Danièle Nouy has given assurances that “we will be a demanding supervisor, however at all times we shall strive to make our action fair and impartial.” The SMM just published its first report that has overseen more than 6,000 banks in the region since last November.

More democracy, not technocracy, Mr. Draghi

By Clément Fontan

On 16 March 2015, ECB chairman Mario Draghi delivered a speech at the Süddeutsche Zeitung Finance Day. Eurozone economic governance reforms were the topic of the day. The structural reforms proposed by Mr. Draghi are ideologically loaded and the creation of new institutions might worsen the democratic troubles in Europe rather than solve them. The ECB and other EU institutions have already been exploiting the financial crisis as an opportunity to implement structural reforms in a coercive manner for more than four years. The results have been worrying, to say the least.

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