US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday reportedly emphasized the significance of Greece’s progress towards implementing memorandum-mandated reforms, which he said would allow the EU to begin talks with the IMF over Greek debt relief.
According to the Greek state broadcaster ERT, Lew made the statements in Washington D.C. during a meeting with Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, who leads a high-level delegation from Athens in the US capital for an annual IMF-World Bank conference.
Lew also repeated his standing position, which apparently reflects the US administration, namely, that Europe should observe its commitment towards making the Greek debt is sustainable.
The issue of possible Greek debt relief, which remains entirely unformulated at present, is expected to attract a significant amount of attention in deliberations at the conference. An added factor in the “calculus” of debt relief is the fiscal targets that the Greek state must meet through 2018, primarily targets for primary budget surpluses as a percentage of GDP.
Beyond the positive impact that even short-term debt relief measures are expected to have on the crisis-battered Greek economy, the increasingly embattled leftist SYRIZA government in Athens wants to secure a sorely needed “political prize” by the end of the year in order to ameliorate public discontent over a cascade of tax increases and pension cuts that went into effect this year.
Tsakalotos was in a meeting with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble after his talks with Lew. He already met with EU Commission Pierre Moscovici earlier in the day.
