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.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
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