European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi severely dampened Athens’ hopes of including Greek bonds in the central bank’s Quantitative Easing program, judging from a response to a Greek MEP, which was released on Monday.
The ECB chief said his institution’s experts are unable at present to evaluate the Greek debt’s sustainability, as previous and more specific debt relief measures are “still insufficient to properly assess both their quantitative effect and the timing of their impact on the dynamics of Greece’s public debt.”
The letter was addressed to European Parliament deputy Nikos Chountis, who represents the small far-left Popular Unity party that was established by SYRIZA cadres that broke from the latter in the wake of the signing of the third memorandum in the summer of 2015.
“The governing council will decide independently on whether and how to conduct purchases of Greek sovereign debt securities… The program has not been designed to target yield developments in individual euro-area countries,” Bloomberg reported Draghi as replying.
The ECB had previously referred to the need for greater clarity over debt relief in order to make its decision on re-including Greece in its asset purchase mechanism, whereas the embattled Tsipras government desperately wanted the QE program along with medium-term debt relief.
