Greece

Late-night negotiations between the Greek, French and German government leaders ended without any sign of a breakthrough that will unlock bailout funds and ensure Greece’s future in the euro region, Bloomberg News reported. With time running out for a deal to free up the remaining 7.2 billion-euro ($8 billion) tranche of aid, talks between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, President Francois Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel broke up shortly before 1 a.m. on Friday in the Latvian capital Riga with the three agreeing only to stay in close contact.

Germany’s finance minister said he couldn’t rule out a Greek default, a stance that will add pressure on Athens as negotiations over much-needed financing enter their final stretch. Asked whether he would repeat an assurance he gave in late 2012 that Greece wouldn’t default, Wolfgang Schäuble told The Wall Street Journal and French daily Les Echos that “I would have to think very hard before repeating this in the current situation.

Leaders of the hard-left faction of Greece’s Syriza party have called for a “rupture” with creditors in a public challenge to Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, as he moves closer to a new bailout deal, the Financial Times reported. The rebels include five members of Syriza’s political bureau and Central Committee led by John Milios, a former shadow finance minister.

In a related story, the International New York Times reported that Greece, having endured five years of economic austerity, is now reeling from a different condition: economic uncertainty. No one knows if Greece’s government, led by the radical left Syriza party, will strike a new deal with European creditors — or if the country will default on its debts, setting off a new crisis. Even if a deal is cut, no one knows what it will look like, whether the Greek Parliament will pass it, or whether a deal will bring a new iteration of austerity and hardship for ordinary Greeks.

Greece on Thursday offered a concession to its international lenders by pushing ahead with the sale of its biggest port, Piraeus. Greece has asked three firms to submit bids for a majority stake in the port, a senior privatisation official said, unblocking a major sale of a public asset as the EU and the IMF demand economic reforms from Athens. Despite the conciliatory move, Germany’s Bundesbank showed no sign of easing off on its hardline stance towards Greece.

Europe’s top banking supervisor said Greek lenders have never been better equipped to deal with the country’s financial crisis, in a show of confidence in the debt-laden state’s banks, which have been stressed by fleeing deposits and political uncertainty in recent months. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Daniele Nouy, the chairwoman of the Single Supervisory Mechanism—the European Central Bank’s bank-supervisory arm—said Greek banks are demonstrating significant resilience. She said the SSM is monitoring their liquidity and solvency positions very closely.

By now it has become familiar: Greece warns that it is about to run out of cash, then manages to scrape together enough to avoid defaulting on its debts. A larger catastrophe is averted in the eurozone, and Greece and its creditors return to haggling over whether the country can get more financial aid, the International New York Times reported. That sequence played out again this week, when Greece managed on Tuesday to make a loan payment of about 750 million euros, or about $837 million, to the International Monetary Fund.

Greece’s finance ministry ordered a €750m payment to the International Monetary Fund, ending days of uncertainty over whether Athens would use the instalment as a bargaining chip in ongoing talks with its creditors, the Financial Times reported. Ministry officials said they had sent a payment order to the government’s national accounts office to ensure it would arrive in the IMF’s coffers by Tuesday, when the loan repayment falls due. “The order to pay has been made,” said one finance ministry official.

Greek leaders have fought fiercely in recent months with politicians from other European countries over relief on Greece’s vast debt load, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Yet the power to decide the fate of Greece lies not just in the hands of these national governments, but also with unelected officials at two powerful institutions: the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Each is a creditor to Greece, and each is expecting the country to repay it billions of dollars of debt in the coming weeks. The influence of the E.C.B.

There have been so many “make-or-break” moments for Athens since Greece’s debt crisis first shook markets five years ago,that it is difficult to know when things might really break, the Financial Times reported. But this much is clear: unless Greece and its international creditors agree a deal soon to close out the country’s €172bn bailout, and then quickly agree another rescue, Athens is likely to run out of money and default on its debts. That would push it perilously close to crashing out of the eurozone.