Their belief that the European and especially the Greek banking system will not experience the banking collapses experienced in the US, expressed the Fokion Karavia, CEO of EUROBANK and Pavlos Mylonas, CEO of the National Bank of Greece in the discussion on “What are the challenges for the Greek and global banking system” of the 8th Delphi Economic Forum, which takes place in Delphi April 26 – 29 and is under the auspices of A.E. of the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou.

“What happened in the USA and with Credit Suisse is rather unlikely to happen in Europe and specifically in Greece” stressed F. Karavias, while he continued that “in Europe we have a strong supervisory system even more so after the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), our system has been tested and succeeded in Europe and European banks have less leveraged loans than American banks.”

Fokion Karavias also emphasized that “in Greece the quality of assets has not been affected in general, the exposure of Greek banks to commercial real estate loans (CRELoans) is very small. But we have variable rate loans (the majority of mortgages are variable rate) and we monitor them very closely.

Dwe have not seen any alarming samples and we have taken two measures which are very positive, the subsidies for the vulnerable and the horizontal cap on interest rates.”

F. Karavias also expressed the belief that there will be no credit crash in Greece (credit crunch), but estimated that there will be credit expansion, but smaller than in previous years.

Also F. Karavias predicted that in May the ECB will raise interest rates by 0.25% “There is momentum in the Greek economy – we had high growth in 2022 and 2023 – so in this context we will not see a significant drop in credit expansion, on the contrary we expect strong expansion mainly in the business sector” emphasized Pavlos Mylonas, Managing Director of the National Bank of Greece, who also emphasized that in Europe there is continuous control and supervision of bank assets.

“In Europe the rules are already strict and they are getting stricter” emphasized P. Mylonas.

The discussion in question was moderated by the head of the Financial Times in the US, Peter Spiegel, who, closing the discussion, said: “It was nice to come to Greece for the good news of the banking system from the US, where bad news for banks dominates.”