EU to sign off second bailout package for Greece today

Euro zone finance ministers will sign off on a second bailout package for Greece today.

The bloc’s original problem debtor, Greece, swapped its privately held bonds over the weekend for new, longer maturity paper with less than half the nominal value, slashing more than 100 billion euros from its debt.

This paves the way for euro zone ministers to give the final go-ahead to a 130-billion-euro package to finance Athens through 2014, after they decided on Friday that Greece – its economy shrunk by repeated austerity measures – had met all their conditions.