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.
JITTERS: Nexperia has a 20 percent market share for chips powering simpler features such as window controls, and changing supply chains could take years European carmakers are looking into ways to scratch components made with parts from China, spooked by deepening geopolitical spats playing out through chipmaker Nexperia BV and Beijing’s export controls on rare earths. To protect operations from trade ructions, several automakers are pushing major suppliers to find permanent alternatives to Chinese semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said. The industry is considering broader changes to its supply chain to adapt to shifting geopolitics, Europe’s main suppliers lobby CLEPA head Matthias Zink said. “We had some indications already — questions like: ‘How can you supply me without this dependency on China?’” Zink, who also
At least US$50 million for the freedom of an Emirati sheikh: That is the king’s ransom paid two weeks ago to militants linked to al-Qaeda who are pushing to topple the Malian government and impose Islamic law. Alongside a crippling fuel blockade, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) has made kidnapping wealthy foreigners for a ransom a pillar of its strategy of “economic jihad.” Its goal: Oust the junta, which has struggled to contain Mali’s decade-long insurgency since taking power following back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, by scaring away investors and paralyzing the west African country’s economy.
BUST FEARS: While a KMT legislator asked if an AI bubble could affect Taiwan, the DGBAS minister said the sector appears on track to continue growing The local property market has cooled down moderately following a series of credit control measures designed to contain speculation, the central bank said yesterday, while remaining tight-lipped about potential rule relaxations. Lawmakers in a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee voiced concerns to central bank officials that the credit control measures have adversely affected the government’s tax income and small and medium-sized property developers, with limited positive effects. Housing prices have been climbing since 2016, even when the central bank imposed its first set of control measures in 2020, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) said. “Since the second half of
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) received about NT$147 billion (US$4.71 billion) in subsidies from the US, Japanese, German and Chinese governments over the past two years for its global expansion. Financial data compiled by the world’s largest contract chipmaker showed the company secured NT$4.77 billion in subsidies from the governments in the third quarter, bringing the total for the first three quarters of the year to about NT$71.9 billion. Along with the NT$75.16 billion in financial aid TSMC received last year, the chipmaker obtained NT$147 billion in subsidies in almost two years, the data showed. The subsidies received by its subsidiaries —
RSS