IMF may hold back on future bailout funds to ailing Greece
GREEK woes deepened over the weekend, with the country’s Prime Minister saying it is now in a “Great Depression” similar to that of the 1930s, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is reportedly considering cutting off aid to the struggling state.
The Troika of lenders to Greece – consisting of the EU, European Central Bank, and IMF – is reviewing Greek progress in meeting the terms of the bailout.
Yet the IMF may already have decided that Greece’s finances are unsustainable and thus that it will not pay more tranches of funds, the German Der Spiegel reported.
Any IMF pull-back on the bailout package would cause a major headache for Eurozone leaders and raise the chance of Greece defaulting on its debts.
And yesterday Prime Minister Antonis Samaras told former US President Bill Clinton: “You had the Great Depression in the US. This is exactly what we’re going through in Greece – it’s our version of the Great Depression.”