Greece wants a "bad bank"

It is one of the rags of the decade left by the 2008 economic crisis in Greece. Bad debts, or non-performing loans (NPLs) to banks, are the sword of Damocles hanging over the banking system. In 2018, they reached 100 billion euros, the highest figure in Europe. On coming to power in July 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Conservative Prime Minister, estimated that his country's economy could never find the path to growth if this issue was not resolved.

Read also: The ECB is considering a "bad bank" for the euro zone

He then set up a system, named "Hercules", whose mission is to help banks settle their bad debts by guaranteeing, up to 12 billion euros, the solvency of indebted creditors, especially companies. At the same time, the most fragile non-performing loans were massively securitized by systemic banks and sold. They thus fell to 60.9 billion euros, or 37.3% of all loans granted by banks.

The bad debt problem should have been resolved over the past three years. But nothing has been done and now, with the pandemic, the problem is likely to get bogged down

The

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