Thursday 18 March 2010

Friends in need...

Financial Times reported that Germany decided not to come to Greece's financial aid, but rather that the country should turn to the IMF if it will need financial assistance.

The Greek government has already said it would turn to the fund as a last resort, but both the European Central Bank and the European Commission have also resisted any such move.
Speaking in Brussels on Thursday morning, George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, told European lawmakers there needed to be a European solution to his country’s debt problems on the table, and that he would prefer this to IMF intervention, even though he insisted Greece did not need any money.

“We are not going to default,” he told a special committee of MEPs in the European parliament. “We are saying that we don’t need this money.”
The government in Berlin still believed that Greece would be able to manage without external financial assistance. “But if it does need help, it will have to come from the IMF,” he added. The chancellor had decided that any other solution would be legally and constitutionally impossible.
The German decision is critical to any common position by the eurozone states on some form of bail-out, because Berlin would inevitably be the largest contributor.

No comments: