ECB member: Greek debt haircut is damaging

A HAIRCUT of Greek debt is damaging to Greece and the euro area, and has stoked wider concern about possible impairment of bonds in other eurozone members, ECB Governing Council member, Athanasios Orphanides said yesterday in a newspaper interview.

“A possible haircut of the Greek debt is unnecessary and it is harmful for Greece and for the euro area as a whole. I still hold this view,” Mr Orphanides, who is governor of Cyprus’s Central Bank, told the island’s Kathimerini newspaper.

He was responding to suggestions that his re-assurances, in the past, that there would be no Greek debt haircut were misleading.