Greece’s cash-strapped government said on Sunday it would impose a new property tax on top of existing austerity measures, to compensate for a revenue shortfall that is threatening to disrupt its vital international bailout program.
The government also decided, in a symbolic move aimed at a public angry at politicians, to dock a month’s pay from all elected officials — from the head of state to the country’s 325 mayors.
“It is better that we all lose something than lose everything, forever,” Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said at a news conference in Greece’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki.
He said Greece is in a constant fight to ensure it can continue paying salaries and pensions, “which we guarantee,” and rejected talk of the country leaving the common European currency and returning to its old monetary unit, the drachma.
“For a country to leave — any country, I’m not necessarily talking about Greece — it will create a domino effect, a pressure on other countries, and will remain as a wound, if not the beginning of the breakup of the entire system,” he said.
Greek Minister of Finance Evangelos Venizelos said the new property tax would be levied over the next two years and will cost citizens an average of 4 euros (US$5.53) per square meter, tapping about 400 billion euros worth of real estate.
Speaking after a three-hour Cabinet meeting in Thessaloniki, Venizelos said the new property levy — in addition to public sector reforms announced last week — would make up for lagging revenues this year by providing more than 2 billion euros, about 1 percent of annual GDP.
“The levy and the reforms are enough for us to pull through, but that also depends on the response of Greek society,” he said. “It will be sufficient for us to achieve our targets.”
Venizelos added that, if the measures work, Greece can expect a budget deficit next year of 17.1 billion euros, almost 8 percent of GDP and slightly higher than the previously predicted 7.6 percent. For next year, he said he expected a primary surplus of 3 billion euros. The primary surplus does not include the cost of servicing the country’s massive public debt.
He warned, however, that the economy was expected to shrink at an even faster pace than expected, contracting 5.3 percent this year.
Debt-crippled Greece urgently needs to keep a program of cutbacks on track to secure the continued flow of international rescue loans — worth 219 billion euros — protecting it from a catastrophic bankruptcy.
In Germany, the government’s vice chancellor raised the possibility of letting Greece default, should the “necessary instruments” be available for such a move. The statement by Philipp Roesler, who is also economy minister, comes amid an unsourced report in Der Spiegel weekly that Germany’s finance ministry has been working up two different scenarios to accommodate a Greek default. The ministry had no immediate comment on the report on Sunday.
Roesler told yesterday’s edition of Germany’s Welt daily there should be “no limits to thinking” of possible scenarios of how to end the euro crisis. Germany has taken on a leading role in helping to bail out other members of the 17-nation eurozone, but is demanding changes to Europe’s fiscal policy be made in the long term.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained