Greece braces for more austerity

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras braces for yet another vote on additional austerity measures, as European creditors remain at loggerheads with the International Monetary Fund about how much debt relief the country will get for its pain.
Lawmakers in Athens are scheduled to vote today [Macau time] on an omnibus bill that includes measures ranging from the taxation of diamond dust and coffee to the transfer of thousands of real estate assets from the state to a new privatization fund. The debate will test the resilience of Tsipras’s three-seat parliamentary majority, as 2-BLM--users_iqjWHBFdfxIU_iLyh9Z9dNaXY_v2_-1x-1

euro-area states resist calls from the IMF to set less ambitious fiscal targets and hand Greece more generous debt relief.
Approval of the measures is one of the prior actions Greece has to fulfill to unlock the next tranche of emergency loans from the European Stability Mechanism, the currency bloc’s crisis-fighting fund. The Eurogroup of 19 finance ministers will convene tomorrow to assess the country’s compliance with its latest bailout agreement struck in the summer of 2015. A positive assessment is also a condition for the Eurogroup to ease the servicing terms for over 200 billion euros (USD225 billion) of bailout loans handed to the country since 2010. Bloomberg

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