money

On the morning of 29 June 2015, Greeks woke up to find their banks closed.

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ATMs were limited to €60 a day. The Athens Stock Exchange did not open for trading.

Capital controls, the kind associated with crisis-era emerging markets rather than members of a developed-economy currency union, had arrived.

Five years earlier, in April and June 2010, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s had cut Greek sovereign debt to junk, the first eurozone member to lose investment grade.

By February 2016 the Athex Composite had bottomed at 516.7 points, a fall of more than 90% from its October 2007 high of 5,334.5. The FTSE Athex Banks index, the country’s lenders, had collapsed by 99.6%.

Greek equities had ceased to function as an asset class.

They had become an obituary.

A decade on, the obituary needs rewriting. The Athens Composite Index has returned roughly 146% over the past five years on a total-return basis.

The Nasdaq 100, riding the artificial intelligence supercycle that has dominated global equity narratives, returned 116% over the same window. The S&P 500 delivered only about half of Greece’s gains, while European large-cap equities – tracked by the Euro STOXX 50 – achieved barely one-third.

This is the story of how Europe’s cautionary tale became one of the best turnaround trades of the modern era.

Greek stocks beat Nasdaq 100 over 5 years: Here is why

To understand the rally, start with the lenders. National Bank of Greece, Eurobank, Piraeus Bank and Alpha Bank carried the heaviest load through the crisis decade.

By late 2016 their combined non-performing loan ratio peaked near 47%, the worst in the European Union. For perspective, most other troubled European banking systems peaked at between 5% and 8%.

Greek lenders were not facing a credit problem. They were carrying a depression on their balance sheets.

The clean-up unfolded in two stages.

The Hellenic Asset Protection Scheme, known as Hercules, allowed the banks to securitise and offload roughly €57bn of bad loans through state-backed guarantees on the senior tranches.

The second leg was the slower work of organic profitability: stabilising deposits, restructuring cost bases, restoring net interest margins.

From bailout to bull market: The Athens turnaround

Combined net profits of the four largest Greek banks reached close to €5bn in 2025.

Shareholder payouts followed suit. Piraeus, Eurobank and Alpha Bank distributed around 55% of earnings, while National Bank of Greece pushed its total payout ratio to 86%, supported by aggressive buybacks.

Konstantinos Hatzidakis, then Greece’s minister of economy and finance, captured the moment in the IMF’s Finance & Development journal in June 2025.

“We have cleaned up bank balance sheets and curbed nonperforming loans. This major milestone has enabled lenders to regain their essential role in financing the real economy,” he wrote.

Hatzidakis pointed to rising deposits, stronger capital buffers and what he described as “a tangible vote of confidence” in the system: the successful sale of the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund’s bank stakes to long-term foreign investors.

“The Greek economy,” he added, “has consistently outperformed expectations, often by a significant margin.”

The quiet engine behind Greece’s economic miracle

The fiscal side of the recovery has received far less attention, but it has been equally important.

In a paper published by the IMF last week, economists Andrew Okello, Stoyan Markov and Chenghong Wang described the transformation of Greece’s tax administration as “one of the quiet engines behind Greece’s broader economic recovery”.

They divided the reform process into three overlapping stages.

The first, between 2010 and 2012, focused on stabilising government revenues under Troika supervision. One of the earliest breakthroughs came via VAT digitalisation: only 65% of registered taxpayers filed VAT returns on time in 2010, compared with 96% by 2014.

The second stage, between 2013 and 2017, centred on institution-building. Greece consolidated 288 local tax offices into 119 and established the Independent Authority for Public Revenue under a landmark 2016 law.

By 2017, the authority had become operational with its own budget and independently selected management board. During that period, the tax-to-GDP ratio rose from 25.8% to 27.6%.

The third stage, from 2018 onwards, introduced real-time electronic invoicing, point-of-sale connectivity and digital analytics systems. VAT revenues climbed from 7.1% of GDP in 2010 to around 9.5% in 2025.

Overall, Greece’s tax-to-GDP ratio rose from 20.5% in 2009 to roughly 28% in 2025.

The result has been a dramatic fiscal turnaround.

Greece recorded a primary surplus close to 5% of GDP in both 2024 and 2025, making it one of only a handful of EU countries running a fiscal surplus at all.

Meanwhile, sovereign spreads over German bunds — which once exceeded 30 percentage points during the peak of the crisis — have returned to levels last seen before the 2008 financial crisis.

According to the IMF’s March 2026 Article IV statement, Greece’s public debt-to-GDP ratio fell by around 10 percentage points in 2025 alone, reaching roughly 145%, down from a peak near 210% in 2020.

The IMF estimates the cumulative decline at roughly 65 percentage points from the pandemic-era peak.

Credit-rating agencies eventually followed. Scope Ratings restored Greece to investment grade in August 2023, followed by DBRS later that year, S&P in October 2023 and Fitch in December 2023.

Moody’s — the final holdout among the major agencies — upgraded Greece to Baa3 in March 2025 and reaffirmed the rating in April 2026.

For the first time in more than a decade, every major ratings agency now classifies Greek sovereign debt as investment grade.

Cheap when nobody wanted to look

The third pillar of the rally was valuation.

Greek equities entered the recovery period trading at discounts that became increasingly difficult to justify once balance sheets stabilised.

Even after the surge, Eurobank Equities estimates Greek banks are trading at roughly 9 times expected 2026 earnings and 1.4 times tangible book value — still more than 20% below European peers.

UBS estimates the sector’s average 2027 price-to-earnings ratio – a key measure of how cheaply or expensively stocks trade relative to expected profits – at 8.4x, compared with 9.5x for European banks overall. For comparison, US equities currently trade at more than 20 times forward 12-month earnings.

Over the past five years, shares of National Bank of Greece and Piraeus Bank have each surged by roughly 500%. Yet despite the extraordinary rally, both lenders still trade at single-digit earnings multiples.

The most structural financial change arrived last.

On 24 November 2025, Euronext completed its acquisition of the Athens Stock Exchange after roughly 74% shareholder acceptance of the all-share offer.

Greek stocks now sits inside Europe’s largest equity listing venue, alongside more than 1,800 listed companies.

The mechanical consequence is a broader pool of natural buyers. International index funds tracking pan-European benchmarks now hold Greek names automatically.

MSCI – the world’s largest index provider – is reviewing Greece for a potential upgrade to Developed Market status, effective September 2026 if approved, which would shift the country out of the small bucket of emerging-market money still chasing it and into the much larger pool of developed-market index allocations.

JP Morgan has forecast a 16% return for the MSCI Greece index in 2026.

Inside the sector, the maturing is showing up in mergers and acquisitions. In May 2026 Eurobank agreed to acquire 80% of Eurolife FFH Life Insurance for around €813m, a deal expected to lift group fee income by roughly 12%.

National Bank of Greece signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Allianz on a 30% stake in Allianz Hellas, with the partnership projected to add 4% to earnings per share.

The Optima offer for Euroxx underscores the same dynamic.

Greek financials are no longer just rebuilding. They are consolidating.

A decade later, Greece looks different

None of this means Greece is insulated from external shocks.

The IMF warned in March 2026 that the outlook remains “clouded by the conflict in the Middle East”. Tourism still accounts for roughly 21% of Greek GDP, leaving the economy vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions.

The Recovery and Resilience Facility — which has underpinned much of the country’s recent investment boom — is also due to wind down in August 2026.

Inflation remains elevated, running at 3.1% year-on-year in February 2026.

Hatzidakis himself acknowledged the remaining weaknesses in his June 2025 essay: investment still trails the EU average, productivity remains below European peers, and female labour-force participation is still among the lowest in the bloc.

Piraeus chief executive Christos Megalou told analysts during the bank’s first-quarter earnings call that a prolonged period of elevated energy prices could slow Greek GDP growth to between 1.5% and 1.6%, albeit still above the EU average.

Still, Greece stands as one of the clearest examples in modern financial history of how a country pushed to the edge of sovereign default managed to engineer a broad-based recovery through fiscal repair, banking-sector restructuring and institutional reform.

Ten years ago, Greek debt was rated junk, banks were shut and the stock market had lost more than 90% of its value.

Today, the sovereign carries investment-grade ratings across the board and the Athens Composite Index has achieved something few thought possible five years ago: it has outperformed the Nasdaq 100.

Whether the next five years will deliver the same kind of returns remains uncertain.

But for the first time in a generation, Greece is no longer a symbol of financial collapse. It is increasingly becoming a case study in recovery.

As Chinese-made products are flooding the EU market and threatening thousands of jobs, the European Commission is stepping up its work to protect the bloc’s production from the risks of China’s excess production.

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The move comes as data from Chinese customs showed that, in the first four months of 2026, Beijing accumulated a surplus of $113 billion with the EU-27, up from $91 billion over the same period in 2025. The surplus widened by $22 billion over 12 month, while the EU’s trade deficit with China had already reached €359.9 billion in 2025.

Pressure is also mounting on Brussels as Beijing has repeatedly threatened retaliation in recent weeks over several EU laws limiting access to the single market for Chinese companies.

On Friday, China also banned these companies from engaging with the Commission over EU foreign subsidy investigations.

To address the China issue and try to restore a level playing field, EU Commissioners are set to debate the matter on 29 May. What options does Europe have on the table?

1. Cutting dependence on Chinese components

The Financial Times reported on Monday that a plan to force EU companies to buy critical components from at least three different suppliers was in the pipeline at the European Commission.

The idea would be to set thresholds of around 30% to 40% for what can be bought from a single supplier, with the rest having to be sourced from at least three different suppliers, not all from the same country.

The proposal comes after China last year restricted exports of rare earths and chips, which are critical for key EU industries such as green tech, cars and defence.

2. Targeting strategic sectors with tariffs

In its economic security strategy presented last December, the European Commission also said it would present new tools by September 2026 to strengthen the protection of EU industry from unfair trade policies and overcapacities.

“We will fight tooth and nail for every European job, for every European company, for every open sector, if we see they are treated unfairly,” Maroš Šefčovič told Euronews.

A decision to impose new quotas and double tariffs on global steel imports, dominated by Chinese overcapacities, was already agreed by EU countries and the European Parliament in April.

Now the chemical industry is in the spotlight. Chinese chemical imports have surged 81% over five years. But the EU chemical sector also relies on exports abroad, including to China, the industry’s fourth export market, which makes any measure targeting China complicated.

“As an export-oriented industry, the European chemical industry generates over 30% of its sales abroad. That creates a risk of retaliation from third countries,” Philipp Sauer, trade expert at Cefic, the lobby group of the European chemical industry, told Euronews.

3. Hitting imports with anti-dumping or anti-subsidy duties

The Commission can also impose duties on Chinese companies when import prices fall below those at which they sell their products on their domestic market. It can also investigate companies for receiving unfair subsidies.

However, investigations can take up to 18 months, and cases are piling up at the Commission’s DG Trade, which has only around 140 officials to handle them.

Sauer said that between one third and half of all ongoing investigations relate to the chemical sector.

4. Using the Anti-Coercion Instrument

The Anti-Coercion Instrument is a last-resort tool — the so-called trade bazooka — which can be used in cases of economic pressure from a third country and would allow the EU to hit China with strong measures such as restricting access to licences or public procurement in the EU.

But its use would require the backing of a qualified majority of member states, which is not guaranteed.

Germany opposed tariffs adopted by the EU in 2024 against Chinese electric vehicles. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has visited China four times in three years, also supports closer ties with Beijing, seeking to secure major Chinese investment.

5. Unifying member states

At the same time, Brussels faces the risk that its decoupling strategy might face significant resistance from national governments. EU member states remain divided over how to approach China, which could in turn allow Beijing to play capitals against each other.

Such differences are already emerging in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, where the EU has proposed a new mechanism requiring the phase-out of so-called high-risk suppliers, such as Huawei and ZTE, in strategic industries, starting with telecommunications.

The proposal, included in the revamp of the EU Cybersecurity Act, is sparking controversy among several European governments, most notably Spain and Germany, which have long worked with Chinese equipment now deeply embedded in their digital infrastructure.

This de-risking strategy has also raised financial concerns, since Chinese suppliers tend to be much cheaper than European alternatives such as Ericsson and Nokia, partly because they are publicly subsidised by Beijing.

European telecom operators have asked the EU for financial compensation to replace their Chinese equipment, following the example of the US “rip and replace” programme, but neither the EU nor national governments seem keen to put the money on the table.

In other words, the EU’s full decoupling from China might have high political and economic costs.

Whether European countries are willing to bear it remains to be seen.

Uzbekistan’s National Investment Fund, known as UzNIF, began trading on the London Stock Exchange on Monday, marking the country’s first international equity offering.

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The fund, which is managed by Franklin Templeton, also launched simultaneously on the Tashkent Stock Exchange through a dual listing structure, bringing Uzbek state-linked assets to international equity markets for the first time.

The opening ceremony at the London Stock Exchange brought together executives, investors and Uzbek officials, with speakers presenting the listing as a significant step in the country’s efforts to expand access to international capital markets.

First international equity offering

Speaking during the ceremony, Julia Hoggett, Chief Executive Officer of the London Stock Exchange, described the IPO as “the first ever international IPO out of Uzbekistan” and said the transaction could help “more global investment to flow” into the country’s economy.

Hoggett also said the dual listing marked “a new chapter both in London and in Tashkent”, adding that the offering connected international investors with a portfolio of Uzbek companies through a single fund managed by an international asset manager.

Saida Mirziyoyeva, Head of the Administration of the President of Uzbekistan, said Uzbekistan was preparing “new listings” and expanding private sector participation, while also working on plans linked to the proposed Tashkent International Financial Centre.

Speaking from the London Stock Exchange balcony, Mirziyoyeva said the IPO was “not just about raising capital” but also about “building trust in a new generation of Uzbek institutions”.

Jenny Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Franklin Templeton, described the IPO as “a defining and historic milestone” for both Uzbekistan and Franklin Templeton, saying the transaction had generated more than $2.8 billion in investor demand globally.

Johnson said orders exceeded the initial offering by more than four times during the bookbuilding process, which ran from late April to mid-May. She added that the domestic offering in Tashkent had become the country’s “largest local listing to date”, allowing local investors to participate alongside international institutional funds.

International investors and state assets

Thirty percent of the fund’s shares were offered internationally through global depositary receipts, while part of the allocation was also made available to domestic investors through the Tashkent Stock Exchange.

According to previously released information from the fund and its advisers, international demand reached around $2.9 billion (€2.6bn), with more than 160 institutional investors participating in the offering. Among them were BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Redwheel.

The IPO raised approximately $603.6 million (€540m), valuing the fund at around $1.95 billion (€1.74bn) at the offer price. The shares were sold by Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, meaning the proceeds from the transaction will go to the state rather than directly to the fund itself.

The international tranche included more than 23 million global depositary receipts, or GDRs, listed in London under the trading symbols UZNF and UZ20. One GDR represents 64,700 shares in the fund.

Cornerstone investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Franklin Resources and Redwheel, as well as treasury companies linked to the Allan & Gill Gray Foundation, committed a combined $300 million (€268m) to the offering.

UzNIF was established in 2024 under a presidential decree and is managed by Franklin Templeton, the US-based investment company that oversees more than $1.4 trillion (€1.25 trn) in assets globally and operates in more than 150 countries.

The fund’s portfolio includes stakes in 13 state-linked companies operating in sectors considered strategic for the Uzbek economy, including electricity distribution, thermal power generation, hydropower, telecommunications, aviation, rail infrastructure, utilities and banking.

Among the companies included in the portfolio are Uzbektelecom, Uzbekistan Airways, Uzbekhydroenergo and several state energy and infrastructure operators.

The listing also reflects broader efforts to develop domestic capital markets in Uzbekistan and increase participation from local investors alongside international institutions.

For Ross Stripling, baseball was something of an accidental career.

He walked onto the team at Texas A&M, majoring in business finance, planning to stick around campus long enough to earn a master’s degree. After his junior year, he turned down a six-figure bonus offered by the Colorado Rockies. After his senior year, he accepted a six-figure bonus to sign with the Dodgers, only to blow out his elbow after one season in the minor leagues.

He was 24. He was at peace. He called home.

“I think the right thing to do is to say I did this baseball thing and go start my life,” he told his father.

If you’re a Dodgers fan, you know the rest of his baseball story: In his major league debut, Stripling was five outs from a no-hitter when Dodgers manager Dave Roberts yanked him. In his nine years in the major leagues, including five with the Dodgers, he pitched in the All-Star Game and the World Series, and he once pitched with his “Chicken Strip” nickname on the back of his game jersey.

His father knew best. Instead of giving up on baseball when he needed Tommy John surgery, his father encouraged Stripling to use the yearlong rehabilitation process as a way to explore what a future without baseball might look like. His grandfather set him up with an internship at an investment firm.

Five years ago, Stripling and his mentor from that firm founded their own financial services company, called Skyward Financial. Now, 21 months after Stripling threw his last pitch in the major leagues, he is throwing a new one: Hey, young athletes coming into a lot of money, I’ve lived in that world, and I’ll show you how to protect your money and build toward generational wealth.

“It’s not me trying to become the next Wolf of Wall Street,” Stripling said. “This is genuine. I want to help kids and their families out in a space that has gotten out of hand in a hurry.”

Matthew Houston, the mentor, said Stripling blew away the brokers when he interviewed for that internship.

“He brings with him, like, a two-inch folder stuffed with handwritten stock reports he had written on minor league bus trips,” Houston said. “He handed us a couple of them, and they were legit Wall Street reports, him doing analysis of stocks. We were falling out of our chair.”

Stripling soon earned his broker’s license. Over the past decade, Houston estimated, he and Stripling might have traded messages about markets and clients “25 to 50 times a day.” One night, Houston watched Stripling pitch on television. Not long after the game ended, he heard the ping of a text message.

“I had just seen him on TV, and it’s like, ‘What do you think about Celgene and Gilead in the biotech sector?’” Houston said. “My mind was blown.”

You don’t need to have played in the major leagues to realize how much money athletes make. Major brokerages want a piece of that money. Some even use former athletes to recruit current ones.

Marc Isenberg, the former director of financial education for Morgan Stanley’s sports and entertainment group and author of the “Money Players” guide for young athletes, wished Stripling well but said he would face significant competition from firms with bigger names and greater resources.

“It’s oversaturated,” Isenberg said. “Almost every single Wall Street firm, to compete for athletes and entertainers, has a sports and entertainment group.”

And it’s not just the behemoths. Stripling checked with a basketball agent, who said he represents 24 college players that each have a different money manager.

There is nothing revolutionary about Stripling’s message: limit the flashy spending now in favor of prudent savings and investment, so you can grow your money through and beyond your career.

Stripling believes he can win by concentrating on young athletes, the ones suddenly showered in six- or seven-figure payments from draft bonuses, college revenue sharing payments, and name, image and likeness deals.

“I’ve seen the first-rounders come in and blow money on cars and houses and gambling,” Stripling said, “and I’ve seen the first-rounders like (former Dodgers shortstop Corey) Seager, who probably hasn’t spent a dime of his signing bonus.”

In a presentation for young athletes — and for the pro teams and college athletic departments that might invite him to speak — Stripling’s firm uses his story of a baseball prospect that got a $900,000 up-front payment and spent the $500,000 after taxes on a red Lamborghini. If the prospect had invested that $500,000 over 30 years into a fund that tracked the S&P 500, he would have made $8.6 million.

“That was the dumbest decision I’ve ever seen anyone make,” Stripling said.

“I have these stories from being in the locker room. I hope that, as a player, my story resonates more than a guy from Goldman Sachs saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a couple good ETFs.’”

Stripling would love the chance to speak at one of the Dodgers’ morning meetings in spring training, where players hear briefings about everything from safety and security to social media.

“I’d like to learn more about it, but I’d be open to putting him in front of the guys,” Roberts said. “I definitely trust him.”

In the meantime, Stripling has a federal record. All brokers do. One form requires brokers to list their employers and job descriptions over the last 10 years. Among all the wealth strategists and financial advisors and registered representatives, Stripling’s form is the one with the job history that starts with this line: “LA Dodgers, Pitcher.”