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.

The European Central Bank will decide after next week’s meeting of euro region finance ministers whether to tighten Greek access to emergency liquidity, two people familiar with the matter said, Bloomberg News reported. The ECB is prepared to raise the discount demanded on Greek collateral to a level last seen in 2014 unless the country’s government shows a willingness to compromise in bailout talks, said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. An ECB spokesman declined to comment.

Greece blamed its creditors for the failure to end the impasse over its fiscal crisis as government bonds slumped and the European Central Bank weighs how much more liquidity to offer its financial system, Bloomberg News reported. No deal will be possible until the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund reduce the number of red lines they’re demanding, a government official said on Tuesday. The comments clouded the outlook for bailout talks, which some officials had said were making progress, and accelerated a selloff in the country’s stocks and bonds.

Greece has vowed to honour heavy debt repayments over the coming weeks but says it is counting on international creditors to release billions of euros in rescue funds before the end of the month as crisis talks between the two sides grind on, The Guardian reported. But as the European commission described discussions over the long weekend as constructive, albeit with more work to be done, one Greek minister criticised the International Monetary Fund’s “extreme” demands for austerity cuts.

Five years into the biggest bailout of a debtor in history, Greece is closer to the brink than ever, with time running out to avert a bankruptcy that could destabilize not only the eurozone, but the global economy as well, The Wall Street Journal reported. When Europe and the International Monetary Fund first agreed to bail Greece out on May 2, 2010, the plan was to return Greece to growth and bond markets within three years. Instead, after half a decade and €245 billion ($274 billion) in promised loans, the two sides have reached an impasse.