Economy of Greece

The Greek bourse continued to slide on Thursday, with more pressure expected on Friday due to September's triple witching.

The Athens Exchange (ATHEX) general index closed at 551.93 points, shedding 0.76 percent from Wednesday's 556.13 points. The large-cap FTSE 25 index fell 0.80 percent to end at 1,471.47 points.

Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos  and Alternate Finance Minister Giorgos Chouliarakis will ask for a lower fiscal target for Greece after 2018 from the representatives of the institutions on Thursday.

A Turkish coast guard chopper flew at low levels over the island of Kos in the eastern Aegean early on Thursday.

According to Greek authorities, the helicopter entered the Athens Flight Information Region (FIR) at 7.10 a.m. and exited at 7.27 a.m. The chopper flew betweet 400 and 500 feet, officials said.

The benchmark of the Greek bourse moved within a particularly narrow margin of just four points on Wednesday, as investors saw no reason for any major moves while talks with the country's creditors are ongoing and international markets are holding their collective breath ahead of next week's central bank decisions in the US.

There will be no bus services in Athens on Thursday before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. as staff stage walkouts to protest the government's plans to privatize public transport organizations.

Skepticism across European markets about the course of the global economy and next week's rate decision by the Federal Reserve in the US, kept buyers on the Greek bourse at bay on Tuesday, with the benchmark showing minimal losses in the end.

Pressure from the US and eurozone markets resulted in significant losses for the majority of Greek stocks at the start of the week, those these were somewhat contained in the closing auctions.

A day after Greek PM Alexis Tsipras’s statements during the TIF press conference that the political process in Germany should not stand in the way of discussions over a possible Greek debt relief, financial news agency MNI reported that any talks of a debt restructuring would be postponed until after the German elections, scheduled to take place in exactly one year.

Minister of Economy, Infrastructure, Shipping and Tourism George Stathakis is confident that the Greek economy will see a “jump” of 2,7% for 12 months in a row from June 2016.

Yet one more session on the Greek bourse went almost a full day with the benchmark in the red, before a late rally offset losses to give marginal gains to the main index through the support of one of the market's biggest stocks, Coca-Cola HBC.