RTE News / Bloomberg — Greece’s finance minister has said he hoped Athens could swiftly qualify for the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme after the successful conclusion of its first bailout review this week.
After six months of tense talks, Greece reached a deal with its foreign creditors which will unlock desperately needed bailout loans and agreed on steps that will help relieve its debt mountain.
“With this review one of our aims was to enter the quantitative easing programme, which we hope will come very soon,” Euclid Tsakalotos said after the decision by euro zone finance ministers.
Under the QE programme, the ECB is currently buying €80 billion of bonds each month to pump new stimulus funds into the euro zone economy.
Tsakalotos said he was optimistic the ECB would also soon resume accepting Greek government bonds as collateral for lending funds to Greek banks.
Both actions, he said, would “send a message to the markets that Greece is like every other country”.
Asked if the government would ease capital controls imposed last June to arrest a run on deposits, Tsakalotos said it depended on the return of bank deposits.
Greece was excluded from the QE programme by the ECB before the January 2015 election as a way of pressuring the new government to accept the lender’s conditions and meet the outstanding conditions for completing the stage evaluation. Mario Draghi had said at the time that the ECB decided that countries governed by bailout agreements will face additional criteria to qualify for QE.
The ECB has accepted Greece’s junk-rated government debt and state-backed securities since 2010 but that arrangement stopped following SYRIZA’s election victory
