Hellenic Financial Stability Fund

Back-and-forth statements between Greece’s lenders and the new leftist government have turned into a proverbial tug-of-war.

While the Greek side insists on clarifying that the Memorandum is over, ESM Managing Director Klaus Regling tried to bring the former back to reality, saying that the “Memorandum has not ended, nor has it been suspended by the loan agreement”.

Two major Greek lenders applied to tap the national central bank's emergency funding a year after ending their reliance on it, a precautionary move stemming from deposit outflows before an election this month, bankers said on Jan. 16.

Greece can use the remaining 11.5 billion euros ($14.4 billion) in its bank rescue fund as a precautionary credit line when it exits its EU/IMF bailout, the country's central bank chief told Greek newspaper Ta Nea on Wednesday.

Greece’s fourth-largest lender Alpha Bank reported a third-quarter loss on Tuesday because of the costs related to a voluntary redundancy scheme for its staff.

Alpha, which passed the European Central Bank’s stress test last month, fell to a net loss of 156.9 million euros after taking a charge of 194.5 million euros on the scheme, which cut its staff by 20 percent.

Greece's finance minister expressed satisfaction on Sunday that the country's banking system «passed successfully» the ECB's stress tests, noting that Athens still has a buffer of 11.4 billion euros at its bank bailout fund.

Greek banks received what amounts to a virtually clean bill of health from the European Central Bank, as the results of the stress tests Frankfurt performed on the four systemic lenders of this country showed on Sunday that Alpha and Piraeus have completed the exercise successfully through their dynamic picture, and only Eurobank and National need to cover the negligible amount of 291 million e