Shares on Greece's stock market closed sharply up Thursday following a debt deal reached by European leaders that the country's finance minister described as a new starting point for the country. But opposition parties blasted the landmark agreement, with conservatives warning it condemned the country to "nine more years of collapse and poverty."
Shares on the Athens Stock Exchange joined a surge in world markets, closing up 4.82 percent at 811.11, with banking stocks up nearly 12 percent during the day after suffering heavy losses earlier this week.
Greece's sky-high rates for long-term borrowing and default insurance also eased slightly.
The deal requires banks to take on 50 percent losses on Greeks bonds. Eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund will also provide an additional euro100 billion ($140 billion) in rescue loans as a second bailout package for Greece.
Greece's troubled euro230 billion ($320 billion) economy is heading into a fourth year of recession, with unemployment at 16.5 percent and taxpayers struggling to cope with a barrage of new taxes on property, purchases and their shrinking incomes.
Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens and author of Zed book The Global Minotaur, spoke to the AP television:
"There's absolutely nothing in the package that was agreed that gives us even a modicum of hope that anything along the lines of (economic) development is happening,"
"We have more austerity and more wishful thinking in terms of how much liquidity can be extracted from the Greek economy, either through privatization or through taxation, in order to pay for these deals," he added.
In the northern city of Thessaloniki, the government did not send a representative to an annual high school parade, a day after anti-austerity protesters there heckled and threw eggs at the country's defense minister.
If you are interested on the current economic climate in Greece, have a look at The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis.
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