Greece pays IMF
The imminent crisis has been averted. Greece has permitted the treasury to make a loan payment of 757 million euros that it owed to the International Monetary Fund. In addition, eurozone finance ministers said that they were encouraged by the progress made in the reforms. However, they are still advising Greece that more work needs to be done and more quickly, because it is working with a tight schedule. Some 1.6 billion euros are also owed to the IMF in June, while 3.5 billion euros will have to be paid to the ECB in July. Greece’s acrobatics are therefore not slated to end soon. The single currency took advantage of the news nonetheless to win back some ground it had lost to its peers, climbing back to the highs it had reached last Friday against the greenback.
It will be a quiet morning on North American markets, because the only interesting economic indicator will be the USD Job Openings and Labour Turnover (JOLTS) Survey. Markets are forecasting that some 5.1 million positions were filled last March, a reading that is essentially unchanged from February.
