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Trump tariffs send chill through Greek peach harvest
Trump tariffs send chill through Greek peach harvest

Yahoo

time16-07-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Trump tariffs send chill through Greek peach harvest

By Lefteris Papadimas NAOUSSA (Reuters) -July is harvest time in Greece's northern peach orchards, where pickers mount wooden ladders and carefully place the fruit in crates ready for factories that peel, slice and can them, often for consumers in the United States. But this year, the harvest is filled with uncertainty after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a 30% tariff on European products that has sent shivers through industries from wine to olive oil and autos. Peach farmers and factory owners are worried that the tariffs will dent demand for their produce just as they are preparing to send their fresh harvest overseas, giving them little time to adapt or find alternative markets. Greece is the world's biggest exporter of tinned peaches, about one fifth of which goes to the United States, its second biggest market after Europe. Peaches, like some other goods, are already subject to a U.S. import levy of 17%. The new tariffs could increase the total import duty to 47%. "Now is even worse because it finds us at the peak, where the entire plant and all the production lines are working at full speed," said Lazaros Ioannidis, co-owner of a peach and fruit processing plant near Naoussa that sends about 40% of its produce to big U.S. companies like Dole. The fertile plain of Central Macedonia in Greece is one massive peach orchard. A sea of pink greets visitors in the spring, when the trees blossom. This week, trucks offloaded crate after crate brimming with thousands of yellow peaches at Ioannidis' plant, where they were loaded onto conveyor belts for processing. Greece's annual turnover from exports of tinned peach and other packaged peach products amounts to more than 600 million euros, with about 120 million euros coming from the U.S. market. Exports to the United States represent about 4% of Greece's total exports. Canned peach and peach derivatives, olives and olive oil are the three top exported agriculture products to the U.S., bringing home about half a billion euros annually. More than 20,000 families, farmers and workers make their income from peach farms and peach factories in Central Macedonia, according to Kostas Apostolou, head of the Greek Canners Association. "Our size might be small as a percentage for the country or the EU but for the region its a big source of income, vital for it's survival." "For the past 6 months, since Trump took office, we have been in a period of an absolute turmoil," says Apostolou. He said that the only alternative is to diversify exports to Mercosur countries in South America or to Mexico and India and urged the EU to sign a trade agreement with those countries. The EU was planning to approve a trade deal with Mercosur but has faced opposition from some countries. Still, there are also optimists "Trump is unpredictable. We hope that he will prove that and he will change this decision," said farmer Vangelis Karaindros as he and his employees picked ripe peaches by hand. Fehler beim Abrufen der Daten Melden Sie sich an, um Ihr Portfolio aufzurufen. Fehler beim Abrufen der Daten Fehler beim Abrufen der Daten Fehler beim Abrufen der Daten Fehler beim Abrufen der Daten

Blast kills a woman in Greek city of Thessaloniki
Blast kills a woman in Greek city of Thessaloniki

The Star

time03-05-2025

  • The Star

Blast kills a woman in Greek city of Thessaloniki

ATHENS (Reuters) - A 38-year woman was killed after an explosion in northern Greek city of Thessaloniki early on Saturday, police officials said, adding that a criminal investigation is under way. "It appears that she was carrying an explosive device and planned to plant it a bank's ATM," a senior police official told Reuters "Something went wrong and exploded in her hands," the official added. (Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas)

Exclusive-Greece to repay first bailout loans by 2031, 10 years early
Exclusive-Greece to repay first bailout loans by 2031, 10 years early

Yahoo

time12-04-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Exclusive-Greece to repay first bailout loans by 2031, 10 years early

By Lefteris Papadimas ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece will pay off loans granted under the first of three debt-crisis bailouts by 2031, two government officials told Reuters, as the country seeks to lose its label as the most indebted country in the European Union. The payments, which will come in 5-billion-euro ($5.7 billion) annual increments, will allow Greece to pay off the debt 10 years before the loans expire, the officials said on condition of anonymity. The Greek economy is gradually rebounding from a 2009-2018 crisis that saw it nearly drop out of the euro zone and that triggered years of social unrest as ordinary citizens fought against austerity-induced cuts in wages and pensions. "Our aim is to fully repay, ten years earlier than scheduled, the rest of the loans from the first bailout which expire by 2041," said one of the officials. The source said that Greece will tap a 37 billion-euro cash buffer, proceeds from higher-than-projected primary surpluses and new bond issues to fund the repayments. In an interview with Reuters, Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis did not comment on the specifics of the timing or the size of the yearly payments, but did acknowledge that loans would be paid back ahead of schedule. "We are confident that this approach will enable Greece to shed the title of the most indebted EU country within the coming years," he said. "This is a realistic and achievable goal." Greece's public debt, now the highest in the euro zone, is expected to drop below 140% by 2027, Pierrakakis said, without giving an exact figure. Borrowing costs have fallen sharply since Greece regained investment grade status in 2023 and are now lower than Italy. The two officials said Greece's public debt is expected to drop to about 135% by 2027, potentially above Italy, whose debt is expected to rise to 138% of GDP in 2026. Greece's crisis began in 2009 when the government discovered a giant hole in the country's finances, caused by decades of tax evasion and bloated public services. As the crisis threatened to derail the EU economy, Greece received three bailouts from euro zone countries and the International Monetary Fund between 2010 and 2015, worth 280 billion euros. Greece paid off the IMF in 2022 and by the end of 2024 had paid off 22 billion euros of its 53-billion-euro first bailout. The rest will now be paid by 2031. Many Greeks who lost everything in the crisis are still struggling with lower wages and inflation. But the economy has rebounded and the government expects 2.3% growth this year, twice the euro zone's average. As the debt of major EU economies, including Germany and Italy, is rising in part due to increased defence spending, Greece has cut its debt burden by more than 50 percentage points since 2020, to 147% of GDP. The second government official said that the debt will decline in 2024, as an absolute number, for the first time since it exited its third bailout, to 365.8 billion euros. ($1 = 0.8818 euros) Sign in to access your portfolio

Exclusive-How ECB dodged a payment disaster in 10 hours of tech meltdown
Exclusive-How ECB dodged a payment disaster in 10 hours of tech meltdown

Yahoo

time07-03-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

Exclusive-How ECB dodged a payment disaster in 10 hours of tech meltdown

By Francesco Canepa and Lefteris Papadimas FRANKFURT/ATHENS (Reuters) - The European Central Bank's payments crash last week meant salaries and welfare funds were delayed for thousands of people. It could have been much worse. If the same disruption had struck, or persisted into, the following day - the end of the month, and payday for many public-sector workers, pensioners and welfare recipients - the mayhem could have hit millions of people and businesses, and strained the banking system. "If it had lasted until Friday, there would have been big risk-management questions for banks," said Alistair Milne, a professor of financial economics at Britain's Loughborough Business School. "Bank risk managers would have to decide: Are we willing to credit the customer account on the trust that the money will eventually turn up?" Reuters can construct the most detailed account to date of the breakdown of the euro zone's main payment system, based on interviews with a dozen people familiar with the day's events including central bank officials, bankers and brokers, and a review of the ECB's messages to market participants. When the system went down on Thursday, the chaos that descended in the 10 hours it took to identify and fix the problem blocked the welfare payments of more than 15,000 mostly elderly and poor Greeks, a large number of salaries and pensions in Austria, plus several financial trades. At the heart of the escalating turmoil was a piece of malfunctioning hardware, but it took hours for the ECB's technicians to spot the problem after an initial, erroneous diagnosis of database issues, according to the ECB messages and officials at the ECB and three other euro zone central banks. This forced central bank staff across many euro zone countries to work throughout the night to fix the defective equipment and clear a backlog of transactions in time for payday, according to officials who like the other sources requested anonymity to discuss this sensitive matter. "A hardware failure is excusable, but not having a backup that can kick-in instantaneously in case of problems is not," said Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament who sits on the committee that oversees the ECB. "Critical infrastructure needs a backup - the ECB should know that." An ECB official told Reuters the affected hardware, which he declined to identify, did have multiple backups and the bank was analysing why they didn't kick in. The ECB had recently completed an overhaul of its payment system and crisis management before this incident, the official added, as recommended in a report by consultancy Deloitte following a string of outages in 2020. The Target payment system, which handles trillion of euros of daily transactions, is so vital to financial and economic stability in the 20-nation euro zone that the locations of its four servers are a closely guarded secret, with the ECB revealing only that they're sited in two different parts of Europe. ECB ACTIVATES EMERGENCY CHANNEL The situation started going south shortly after 8 a.m. Frankfurt time on Thursday when the ECB's system for settling financial trades, Target 2 Securities (T2S), crashed. The Target 2 (T2) network, which handles large payments between central banks and commercial lenders, followed suit two hours later, according to ECB updates to market participants. Both T2 and T2S are run by the ECB with the central banks of Germany, Italy, France and Spain. In phone calls that morning between crisis managers at the ECB and the other central banks, the blame was put on errors in the systems' shared database, which would make a transfer to a back-up version - or "failover" - impossible without copying over the same issue. This required staff at the central banks to laboriously parse through transactions to identify the mistake while the system was offline. At 11.30, the crisis managers activated the Target systems' emergency channel for critical payments, such as those involving foreign currencies or margin calls. This is to prevent any disruption from spilling over to other currencies or jamming the functioning of financial markets. This process, which requires participants to submit every transaction manually, is ill-suited for the hundreds of thousands of payments that go through T2 and T2S every day. A few dozen payments went through in that way but all others had to be placed in a queue, waiting for the problem to eventually be fixed. It was not until the afternoon that the ECB established there was actually what it later described as a "defective hardware component" at one of the system's four locations. Staff then began moving all transactions to the backup, or failover, shortly before 1600. The move was completed at 1715 and settlement resumed at 1800, lasting through the evening until a delayed midnight deadline, the ECB messages showed. The officials at the ECB and three other central banks said work continued until the early morning to clear most of the transactions that had been queued up over the previous day. PAYMENT SYSTEM THAT NEVER FAILS? The fallout didn't stop there. Some transactions had been cleared too late for the banks to process in time on Friday, leading to the delays of thousands of people in Greece and Austria receiving salaries, pensions and welfare payments. Brokers were also left fuming over delayed trades, according to three market sources who declined to give details about the affected transactions. One Dutch broker told Reuters some of his clients were charged interest for money they agreed to borrow but never actually received as a result of the outage. They were planning to seek compensation from the ECB, as is envisaged under Target rules. Paul Harris, partner at London-based law firm Osborne Clarke, said market participants would likely find it more difficult to get compensation from a central bank than when a private firm was at fault. "When (commercial) banks have problems with their architecture, the recriminations last for a significant period," he said. "But so far there doesn't look to be anything like the same level of accountability here, even though the damage to market stability could have been far greater." In a message after the event, the ECB described the breakdown as a "major incident" that had "adverse consequences for market participants as well as for their clients" and said it had started a "thorough analysis" of the episode. The ECB's latest annual report shows T2 was available at all times in 2021, 2022 and 2023. In 2020 it was up and running 99.46% of the time - below the targeted 99.7%. "A payment system that never fails may not be buildable," said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at U.S. think-tank the Brooking Institution who specialises in financial technology. "And, if it is, it may be more costly than tolerating a few hours of delay." (Additional reporting by Sinead Cruise and David Milliken in London, Leika Kihara in Tokio, and Howard Schneider and Pete Schroeder in Washington; Editing by Elisa Martinuzzi and Pravin Char) Sign in to access your portfolio

'We are back' Greek shipyards say after decades of pain
'We are back' Greek shipyards say after decades of pain

Yahoo

time18-02-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

'We are back' Greek shipyards say after decades of pain

By Lefteris Papadimas ATHENS (Reuters) - The sound of hammer blows and welding drifted from the Skaramangas Shipyard near Athens last month as workers repaired the bow of a large tanker, while other vessels waited to be fixed in a dry dock nearby. The activity marks a major turnaround for the shipyard: a year ago, following decades of on-off government ownership, it sat empty, an emblem of the lingering impact of Greece's devastating 2009-2018 debt crisis. "Now there is vitality again," said Theodoros Evagelou, who was sandblasting and painting vessels at the yard. "I couldn't find a job anywhere." The fate of the Skaramangas Shipyard, which was sold by the government to shipping tycoon George Prokopiou last year, is a sign of Greece's wider rebound from the crisis that has also seen the state sell off bailout stakes in banks, and holdings in a major airport and highway. The centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has also since 2019 sold its stakes in the Elefsina and Syros Shipyards. Bringing in shipowners means they can generate business by repairing their own ships in Greece - rather than in Turkey, Asia or Romania. While Greeks own the biggest merchant fleet in the world with 5,500 vessels, the country's shipyards have lost ground to competitors elsewhere and until now, attempts at privatisation have stalled or failed. Skaramangas Shipyards has repaired 37 ships in the past year and expects to double that next year, CEO Miltiadis Varvitsiotis told Reuters. The rise is mirrored in the wider industry: ship repairs in Greece approached 700 last year from 330 in 2013, data from the statistics service show. "We are back and we are here to stay," Varvitsiotis said. EXPANSION PLANS The increased business has already doubled the shipyards' contribution to the country's GDP to 1.5%, said Panos Xenokostas, owner of ΟΝΕΧ Shipyards and Technology that bought the Elefsina and Syros Shipyards from the state in 2020 and 2018. He wants to increase that to as much as 2.5% in five years. Annual repairs in his two yards have jumped from a couple of dozen in the last decade to 220 in 2024, said Xenokostas, who plans to expand his businesses into building ships and drilling platforms and to repair specialised liquefied natural gas carriers. "The boom in shipyards is putting Greece back in the game as a repair hub in the Mediterranean," said maritime expert and shipping financier George Xiradakis. "They can't replace the big Turkish and Asian shipyards but they can get a significant portion." Greece built and repaired hundreds of ships in the 1960s and 70s, before much of the industry passed into government hands during an economic slowdown in the 1980s. The working class suburbs west of Athens, where most of the shipyards operate, are seeing a rebound, too. In the seaside town of Perama, dozens of companies act as subcontractors for the big shipyards. Unemployment, at 40% 10 years ago, has plummeted so low that contractors can't find enough workers, said mayor Yiannis Lagoudakos. "Now we need more roads and parking spaces to deal with the increased traffic," said Lagoudakos. "Our town is flourishing." Sign in to access your portfolio

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