THE Alexis Patelis presented it book His “Great Return”, in which he describes his career as an economist and head of the Prime Minister’s financial office from 2019 – 2024.
As Alexis Patelis pointed out in the show “Live News” and Nikos Evangelatos, the book “It is written as a novel and somehow we lived it, because the government started in ’19 with a very specific program to implement and immediately, in ’20, the coronation appeared.
Everything was closed, we borrowed another 10, 20, 30, 40 billion and up to say this, the crown came again. Then, in ’22, Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices fired and we had the energy crisis, inflationary crisis, so real life was a thriller to some extent. “
“The big return of Greece, what do we mean by that? That our country from where it was a pariah country, we had capital controls, at some point we recovered the investment level, we also reached the cover of the Economist. (…)
We as a country and as a people have studied very much how we entered the crisis, many books have been written, but if we want to go ahead, study and how we came out of the crisis. I think this is one of the first books this issue has. “
As he says: “We always want to improve the situation, we want progress, all people want to have the above, but to do so we have to see and how we got here. The message of the book is that Greece can, that Greece is confident and can achieve its goals. He has overcome one of the biggest crises that has lived in any country in peace time and we look forward again and this optimistic message gives the book. “
“From ’19 until today, in my view, it was the first time we had a government that had its own plan, the plan of the Greeks, and which he announced and then implemented, with this course we must continue. The key is to have a plan, ”he adds.
“Economic growth and reliability are linked to the implementation of a plan, which must be reliable to be implemented.”
To the question about the most difficult time he lived, he answered: “The pandemic was undoubtedly, in the sense that it was unpredictable, but it was also the rescue of Piraeus Bank. In ’19 there were two big ‘grenades’, PPC, which as a company had 1.7 billion losses annually and threatening the country with a total black out, and were the banks which, in the markets say, are as weakest your weakest link.
The weakest link then was Piraeus Bank, which needed capital but was forbidden by the European rules to put the state the money. I had to find a solution, I describe it in the book. “