16th October, 2015, Optimism grow that Greece’s Banks will have manageable capital needs after stress tests

•  The EU has agreed to open new chapters in Turkey's long-stalled accession talks in return for cooperation on the refugee crisis. EU members are also considering billions in financial aid for Ankara. The EU and Turkey also agreed to "speed up" the talks on easing visa restrictions for Turkish citizens.

• According to Greece's Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE) economic contraction will be less than it was initially expected for 2015. More specifically, it issued a revised forecast for the course of the economy this year according to which there will be a reduction of GDP by 1.5 – 2.0% vs 2.3% which was initially forecasted.
  

• Press linkages suggest that during the discussions between the Greek Banks’ leaderships and the Single Supervisory Authority’s officials, the latter implied that capital needs of Greek Banks won’t be unmanageable. These discussions occurred at ECB’s headquarters in Frankfurt and all Greek Banks’ leaderships participated in this meeting. There will be a second round of meetings of each Greek Bank with ECB’s officials, today. For the record, Greece’s government will have to submit the recapitalisation bill in local Commons by October 20^th.

• Greek Banks’ stocks rallied by +14% during yesterday trading session due to expectations that capital needs won’t be unmanageable. This helped to the overall increase of local index by 2.74% and to the increase of trading volume which approached the level of 50 mios. For the record, capital controls prevent local depositors to invest to stocks and trading volume is related either to existing investments in stocks or new funds from abroad.

• The team of experts which was appointed by government, to come up with recommendations as regards the local pension system’s sustainability enhancement, announced its conclusions. Although its report didn’t include figures, the committee recommended streamlining of all pension funds into one, a unique National Pension to apply on all pensioners and personal contributions to add to the National Pension.

• It appears that Ministry of Economy’s Stathakis is involved in a case according to which he didn’t declare 1 mios euros from his personal belongings. This represents a crime according to Greek legislation. In another case it appears that Ministry of Defence’s Kammenos uses an anti-submarine helicopter twice a day, to commute from home to his office for a distance of 40 km.

• There was a serious incident between fascist Goden Dawn’s MP Lagos and the MPS of Greece’s communist party (KKE) at the Greek Parliament. Lagos didn’t only attack verbally the MPs of communist party during his parliamentary speech, but he attempted to leave the podium and approach the place where the MPs of KKE were standing. In addition, he attacked verbally the Speaker of Commons. For the record, Lagos is involved in the assassination of anti-fascist rapper Fyssas and currently is in custody. However, he was re-elected as MP in last September’s elections.     

Risk assessment. In Greek mythology, Iphigenia was the daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra, and thus princess of Argos.  After offending Artemis, Agamemnon was commanded to kill Iphigenia as a sacrifice to allow his ships to sail to Troy. Greece’s pension system appears to represent Greece’s contemporary Iphigenia, which will be sacrificed, in order to allow local economy to breath from extremely high taxation.

According to the Committee’s recommendations there will be significant impact on all pensions above 1,000 euros and less impact on pensions below this threshold. In addition pensions will be linked to pensioner’s income according to Australian system.   

At the moment, there are approx. 3 mios pensioners (including those who are in waiting list) vs. 3.5 mios contributors (employees, professionals etc). In addition, the average monthly pension is higher (approx. 1,000 euros) compared to average monthly income of contributors (approx. 700 euros). It is evident that contributions are not sufficient to feed pension system.

Last but not least, a significant % of existing pensioners are under 67 years old.  According to figures published by Ministry of Labour, the contribution of Greek state to pension funds reached the level of 200 bios euros during the period 2000-2014 which more than country’s annual GDP (approx. 180 bios). Needless to say that a sustainable pension system represents a major pillar not only for Greek economy but for any economy (including European one).

In any case, local pension system isn’t sustainable and represents one of the main reasons which results to significant tax burden and clientelism.