Galery

1

He acknowledged that this year recession in the country is about 5.5 per cent and that the GDP of Greece will continue to drop in 2012. "We could succeed if we all work, if we give up some suicidal attitudes in our country. We have to form budget surplus as soon as possible to stop being humiliated and be able to look at our partners with dignity. Nobody says it is easy," he concluded.

Far calmer and more pragmatic were the representative of the business circles in Greece, who urged the government to cope with the clientelist state once and for all. "Real change will come from decisive structural reforms. They are a national necessity, which accidentally coincides with the Memorandum and the Troika. We did not dare to liberalize the labour market, we did not dare to privatize. Everything remained just words. These are the new measures to be implemented rather than tax increases. We can no longer delude our creditors, they found out. So, we faced the distrust not only of creditors but also of public opinion and citizens around the world, who see that neither our political system, nor our society is ready to change," was the call by Dimitris Daskalopoulos, the president of Union of Greek Industrialists.

The President of the National Bank of Greece Vassilis Rapanos, who spoke at the forum of the Economist magazine in his capacity of President of the Association of Greek Bankers, outlined the general situation of the Greek banking sector, which is the first victim of the debt crisis. The banks have not cause the crisis, but the crisis seriously has affected them. "The European Central Bank should provide liquidity to us by buying the government bonds but our own bank bonds too. However, every day it devalues ​​our bonds in accordance with the growth of the Greek spread-indicator. We would like more flexibility on its part. Banks are of the few multinational companies of Greece and they should be saved," Vassilis Rapanos called. According to Bob Traa, however, the problem is purely technical and not a matter of flexibility on the part of Frankfurt. The increase in the spread-index leads to devaluation of bank bonds.