The IMF and the Greek government’s financial assets, part 2

Last week, we revealed a significant discrepancy between the Greek government’s net debt as reported by the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook database and what you’d get if you replicated the IMF’s standard methodology for netting out “financial assets corresponding to debt instruments” using data published by the Bank of Greece.

Neither the IMF nor the Bank of Greece had responded to our requests for an explanation of the discrepancy at the time we wrote our original post, nor did either institution respond in time for our follow-up discussion of the Greek government’s equity portfolio. Four days after we’d emailed our original question (while we were on holiday) we finally got some responses.