Greece to dominate economic news again after left-wing election victory

SOONER or later, Greece will start to dominate Euro-related news again, now that Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing party have been sworn back into power.

After the latest general elections, Mr Tsipras breezed back into the poisoned hot-seat with even more power than before.

The anti-austerity leader had managed to strike a last-minute deal with its creditors for a sum of €86bn, preventing Greece from defaulting on its debts and being forced out of the Eurozone.

Investors are still pointing to Greece’s long-term issues as the key indicator for Euro deterioration against most major counterparts into the first quarter of 2016.

There is an air of anticipation that GBPEUR could start to head back towards 1.40 once the US finally starts to move its own interest rates.

In other news, the EU Quantitative Easing Programme (QE) may be allowed to continue beyond its scheduled expiry date of September 2016.

After its early success and signs of real economic improvement, questions are starting to surface again as to whether the bond-purchasing programme may need to be extended, due mainly to slow growth and weak inflation figures.

The latest figures for September actually showed that the Eurozone had ‘deflated’ as prices fell by 0.1 per cent. This is the first time in six months that the numbers have fallen into negative territory.

President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, had warned this could happen, so there were no sudden shocks for the market. There are expectations that Mr Draghi wants to keep the Euro relatively weak, especially against the greenback, as exports have been gaining from a frail currency pairing of EURUSD.