Greece will not make a debt repayment to the IMF due next month, as it does not have the money, Minister of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction Nikos Voutsis said on Sunday.
“The four installments for the IMF in June are 1.6 billion euros [US$1.8 billion]; this money will not be given and is not there to be given,” Voutsis told Greek Mega TV’s weekend show.
Shut out of bond markets and with bailout aid locked, Athens has been scraping state coffers to meet debt obligations and to pay wages and pensions.
Earlier, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greece cannot absorb more austerity and creditors must compromise to break the impasse over the release of funds for Athen’s cash-strapped economy.
Tsipras earlier sought to placate critics within his SYRIZA party after returning from an EU summit in Riga, Latvia, where talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande failed to yield a breakthrough on measures to unlock bailout funding. Some members of his party advocate defaulting on loans rather than backing down from the anti-austerity policies that swept it to power in January, even if that leads the country out of the eurozone.
“We have shown willingness to compromise to get to a mutually beneficial solution,” Tsipras said in a speech at the start of a two-day meeting of SYRIZA’s central committee on Saturday. “[However,] we ask from our partners the same respect, and to also make concessions.”
A Greek exit from the euro is just a matter of time and would not lead to the breakup of monetary union, former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan told Het Financieele Dagblad in an interview published on Saturday.
An exit could make the euro stronger, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said in an interview in the Euro-am-Sonntag newspaper.
German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble mentioned the possibility that Greece might need a parallel currency alongside the euro, if the nation’s talks with creditors fail, according to two people who attended a recent meeting, who added that he did not endorse the idea.
The German Ministry of Finance on Friday called the account of Schaeuble’s remarks “inaccurate.”
Negotiators from Greece and its creditors are continuing technical talks in the so-called Brussels Group “over the coming days in order to accelerate progress,” European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said on Friday.
Eurozone finance officials, known as the Euro Working Group, are to hold a teleconference on Thursday to discuss Greece, two people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named in line with policy.
Before then, the European Central Bank’s Governing Council is to hold its weekly review of emergency liquidity support to the nation’s lenders.
Pensions, sales-tax rates and targets for a primary budget surplus are among the open issues remaining between Greece and its creditors, a Greek government official told reporters after the meeting between Tsipras, Merkel and Hollande.
A main obstacle is that the IMF needs to be on board, he said.
“I know that there is a lot of work to be done, that the parties are now working,” IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said on Friday in Brazil. “It has to be a comprehensive approach and, as I said in other places, it cannot be a quick and dirty job. The IMF is not known for doing that, nor are the other partners in the negotiations.”
Failure to reach a deal quickly would create immediate hardship for Greece, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Tsipras in a telephone call on Friday, according to an e-mail from the US Treasury.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
BARRIERS: Gudeng’s chairman said it was unlikely that the US could replicate Taiwan’s science parks in Arizona, given its strict immigration policies and cultural differences Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登), which supplies wafer pods to the world’s major semiconductor firms, yesterday said it is in no rush to set up production in the US due to high costs. The company supplies its customers through a warehouse in Arizona jointly operated by TSS Holdings Ltd (德鑫控股), a joint holding of Gudeng and 17 Taiwanese firms in the semiconductor supply chain, including specialty plastic compounds producer Nytex Composites Co (耐特) and automated material handling system supplier Symtek Automation Asia Co (迅得). While the company has long been exploring the feasibility of setting up production in the US to address
OPTION: Uber said it could provide higher pay for batch trips, if incentives for batching is not removed entirely, as the latter would force it to pass on the costs to consumers Uber Technologies Inc yesterday warned that proposed restrictions on batching orders and minimum wages could prompt a NT$20 delivery fee increase in Taiwan, as lower efficiency would drive up costs. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made the remarks yesterday during his visit to Taiwan. He is on a multileg trip to the region, which includes stops in South Korea and Japan. His visit coincided the release last month of the Ministry of Labor’s draft bill on the delivery sector, which aims to safeguard delivery workers’ rights and improve their welfare. The ministry set the minimum pay for local food delivery drivers at
RSS