Mitsotakis back as Greece PM in poll landslide

ATHENS—Kyriakos Mitsotakis embarked Monday on his second term as Greece’s prime minister with a vow to accelerate institutional and economic reforms, after voters handed him a huge election victory for the second time in five weeks.

Crediting Mitsotakis and his New Democracy party for bringing economic stability to the erstwhile EU debt laggard, voters gave the conservatives their widest winning margin in almost 50 years on Sunday.

Hailing the “strong mandate”, Mitsotakis said that “major reforms will proceed rapidly”, adding that he had “ambitious” targets for his next four years in power that could “transform” Greece.

Among his pledges is pouring money into Greece’s public health system -- which was stretched to its limits by the Covid-19 pandemic -- and improving railway safety after the deaths of 57 people in a February train collision that was Greece’s worst rail disaster.

WASHINGTON—The US Coast Guard said Sunday it had launched an investigation into the cause of the underwater implosion that destroyed the small submersible Titan, with the loss of all five people aboard during a dive to the Titanic wreck. The Coast Guard said it had created a marine board of investigation (MBI), its highest level of probe, for this drama and ultimately tragedy in the North Atlantic that drew worldwide attention.

“My primary goal is to prevent a similar occurrence by making the necessary recommendations to enhance the safety of the maritime domain worldwide,” Jason Neubauer, the Coast Guard’s chief investigator and leader of this probe, told a press conference in Boston.

“The MBI is already in its initial evidence-collection phase, including debris salvage operations at the incident site,” he added.

Neubauer said the US probe could also make recommendations on the possible pursuit of civil or criminal sanctions “as necessary.”

Titan was reported missing last Sunday and the Coast Guard said Thursday that all five people aboard the submersible had died after the vessel suffered a catastrophic implosion.

A debris field was found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean’s surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Canada, which helped in the search for the submersible, said Saturday it was carrying out its own probe. AFP

The 55-year-old former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate said Sunday that he “constantly strove to improve and learn from my mistakes”.

Mitsotakis, who steered the EU nation from the pandemic back to two consecutive years of strong growth, had already scored a resounding win in an election in May.

But having fallen short by five seats in parliament of being able to form a single-party government, he refused to try to form a coalition, in effect forcing 9.8 million Greek voters back to the ballot boxes. AFP

Fed exec calls for independent review of bank failures this year

WASHINGTON, USA—A senior Federal Reserve official has criticized proposals to increase bank capital requirements and called for an “independent and impartial” investigation into the rapid failure of US banks earlier this year.

Fed governor Michelle Bowman said Sunday that a recent report into banking failures put together by the US central bank’s vice chair for supervision, Michael Barr, was “not reviewed by the other members of the Board prior to its publication.”

“Troublingly, other Board members were afforded no ability to contribute to the report’s content,” she told a conference in the Austrian city of Salzburg in prepared remarks.

“There is a genuine question whether these efforts provide a sufficient accounting of what occurred,” she added.

Barr’s report called for greater banking oversight while admitting to the Fed’s own failures in its oversight of the failed California lender Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Bowman’s comments highlight the division at the top of the Fed over the best path forward on bank regulation following the swift collapse of regional lenders including SVB, which failed following a bank run by concerned depositors in March.

‘Unintended consequences’

Speaking in a Congressional hearing on Thursday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell addressed reports that regulators are considering raising capital requirements for some US banks by as much as 20 percent.

“The capital requirements will be very, very skewed to the eight largest banks,” he said, adding that there may also be some capital increases for other banks.

But he said that “none of this should affect banks under $100 billion (in assets).”

On Sunday, Bowman said there was “room to improve bank supervision for large banks,” adding that such reform efforts should be “informed by an impartial and independent review of what led to the failures.”

“We must be circumspect about what went wrong, deliberate about what to fix, and cognizant of unintended consequences,” she said.

“Misperceptions and misunderstandings about the root causes,” of the bank’s failures could cause “real harm to banks and their customers, to the financial system, and to the broader economy,” she added. AFP