Greece has begun talks for ending IMF aid to the country, but is set to continue to have routine post-bailout reviews by the Washington-based group, a Greek official said after talks with IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Sunday.
The IMF is deeply unpopular in Greece for insisting on austerity cuts under Greece’s multibillion US dollar EU/IMF bailout, and Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras hopes that cutting ties with the IMF will help turn around his flagging political fortunes.
Greek leaders told the IMF that the crisis-stricken nation could quit its rescue program more than a year early when officials met in Washington.
Greek Minister of Finance Gikas Hardouvelis told Lagarde that Athens can do without further loans, which have propped up the nation’s economy since it came close to crashing on a mountain of deficit and debt in 2010.
“We don’t need the rest of the money that from the start of next year we were on course to get from the current memorandum. We can leave it one-and-a-half years earlier ... that is our goal,” Samaras said.
Aid disbursements from the IMF had been due to expire in March 2016, in contrast to funds from eurozone countries, which end this year.
At 240 billion euros (US$304 billion), the lifeline was the largest rescue program in global financial history and was aimed at preventing the debt crisis that affected Athens from spreading to the rest of the eurozone.
Samaras denies that Greece now wants an acrimonious divorce from the IMF.
The organization, perhaps more than the EU, has insisted on tough reforms and austerity measures in return for the rescue funds.
The tightening has exacerbated a six-year recession, the worst on record, left a quarter of the workforce unemployed and seen support for Samaras’s fragile coalition fall.
Hardouvelis, who met Lagarde with Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras, presented a plan detailing the nation’s ability to cover its financing needs from bond markets.
“Everything is on the table, the discussions have started ... we will have a relationship with the IMF, but not under the same conditions,” a Greek Ministry of Finance spokesperson said.
Last week, Lagarde said she believed Athens would continue to require aid before it could go it alone.
“The country would be, in our view, in a better position if it had precautionary support,” she said. “So we are talking about evolution in the relationship, but we believe that the relationship can still be extremely helpful for the country to move on.”
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