BERLIN (MNI) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday again
stressed that overcoming the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis will be a
relatively long process.
“I’ve always said it will be a longer process which will continue
for a longer time,” Merkel told reporters here.
Pointing to the German-Franco proposals revealed on Monday, Merkel
said the road to overcoming the crisis was now clear.
Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the
joint plan includes a modified EU treaty that would allow for automatic
sanctions for countries with budget deficits above 3% of GDP.
At Thursday’s and Friday’s European summit “we will make decisions
which we take to be important, indispensable for the Eurozone,” Merkel
said today. The decisions “will make a contribution to stability … and
also to winning back confidence,” she said.
Commenting Monday’s warning by the rating agency Standard & Poor’s
on the credit status of Eurozone member states, the Chancellor only said
that “what a rating agency is doing is in the responsibility of the
rating agency.”
French Budget Minister Valerie Pecresse was more outspoken. In a
newspaper interview published today she criticized that the S&P warning
“does not take into account the very important announcements made by
Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel yesterday.”
A “very rapid” EU accord on the German-Franco plan should
“stabilize the markets and discourage speculation,” the minister told
the French business daily Les Echos, arguing that the recent decline in
borrowing rates showed that Eurozone was moving “in the right
direction.”
–Berlin bureau: +49-30-22 62 05 80; email: twidder@marketnews.com
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