Finance

 Deposit outflow finds its way to foreign investment products and to bank accounts in lenders based abroad

By Evgenia Tzortzi

Turkey is a large emerging market with good growth prospects relative to most of the BRICs, the senior director of global rating agency Fitch Ratings has said.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency Feb. 16, Fitch Ratings Senior Director Paul Rawkins said the risks lie mostly on the external side for the country.

By Katie Linsell and Sally Bakewell

The battle between fear and greed in Europe?s credit markets is over as Mario Draghi?s quantitative easing ensures that not even the threat of a Greek exit from the euro is endangering risk appetite.

Menda Stoyanova, Chair of the parliamentary budget committee, has suggested that there is no cause for concern over the medium-term bond program by 2017 worth BGN 16 B, stressing that it is a financing program using external debt.

By Ilias Bellos

While the ratio between foreign sellers and buyers of Greek stocks has reached two-to-one in recent weeks, according major local stock brokers, buyers have recently included a new generation of investment groups aiming to benefit from the very low prices, mostly of Greek banks but also of other large groups.

HSBC published a full-page letter in British newspapers on Feb. 15 to offer its "sincerest apologies" for past practices at its Swiss private bank, which has been accused of helping clients to evade tax.

The EU has approached the Greek debt problem as a technical one up until now. Greek governments used to share that perspective. No more. Alexis Tsipras and his Radical Coalition of the Left (Syriza) puts politics front and center. Why? Because the purely mathematical approach of debt dynamics turned out to be a disaster.

By Roula Salourou

A new repayment scheme being drafted by the SYRIZA-led government for the settlement of debts to tax authorities and social security funds provides for a maximum of 100 installments, like current legislation, but states that these should not exceed 20 or 30 percent of a debtor?s annual income last year.

BELGRADE - The best anti-recession measure available to Serbia right now is an increase of public investments which should increase from 3 to 3.5 percent of the GDP this year, the Fiscal Council (FC) released.

There is enough money to achieve this, and there are also projects which can be realised to this end, states the Council in the latest analysis.

By Marius Zaharia

Private holders of Greek default insurance could be in for a payout of over $750 million if Greece defaults on debt owed to the European Central Bank or other public-sector creditors, lawyers said.