EUROZONE CRISIS: Greece crisis could topple Brussels project, top ratings agency warns
GREECE’S financial crisis could erupt once more in an economic cataclysm which would lead to the collapse of the eurozone, a top ratings agency has warned today.
By MONIKA PALLENBERG
Express.co.uk
Tue, Sep 6, 2016
Leading experts Fitch warned that the stricken Mediterranean country remains the biggest threat to the future of the EU despite seven years of gruelling recession and austerity imposed from Berlin and Brussels.
Athens has the highest debt and unemployment rates in the world and has become a simmering hotbed of anti-EU feeling.
Rating agencies started to downgrade the country’s creditworthiness at the end of 2009, when its horrendous deficit was made public for the first time.
Since then the hated ‘troika’ – the EU Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – have launched three aid programmes in a desperate bid to save Greece.
But nothing much has changed, according to Fitch, raising the prospect that the country could still collapse, dragging the Euro currency down with it.
And at the end of the year, when the next tranche of the aid programme is supposed to be paid out, the next crisis is set to erupt, analysts at the rating agency have warned.
Greek government bonds are graded “CCC” by Fitch which is deemed the highest default risk.
After that there is only “D” – in other words insolvency.
Fitch warned that Athens has the second highest value of debt among all of the countries it rates.
But the agency says it is possible for Athens to increase its primary surplus in the coming years as planned to 1.75 percent in 2017 and 3.5 percent in 2018.
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