Eurozone finance ministers warned on Thursday that a “window of opportunity” was closing on bridging a split over Greece’s bailout program, even as they failed to heal a row with the IMF over debt relief.
The IMF and the 19-nation single currency area are battling over how much debt relief Greece needs, and over economic targets required of Athens that the IMF says are not realistic.
“The window of opportunity is still open, but will soon shut because there are elections coming,” French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said after unsuccessful talks on Greece with his eurozone counterparts.
In addition, by the summer “Greece faces important debt repayments, so we have to find a solution before then,” Sapin said, with bailout cash blocked until a solution is found.
Months of bickering have delayed progress of Greece’s 86 billion euro (US$92.4 billion) bailout program agreed in 2015 and officials are increasingly worried that elections this year in the Netherlands, France and Germany could further poison any progress.
Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem insisted that the IMF remained committed to the Greek bailout program, but that its demands were indeed strict.
“The IMF has been very clear and consistent on its position. They want the reform package to be credible, they want the fiscal trajectory to be feasible and economically viable and they want the debt to be sustainable,” said Dijsselbloem, who is also the Dutch finance minister.
Germany, Greece’s biggest creditor, says that Athens is up to the task of meeting the targets without further debt relief and has called on the Greek government to deliver on reforms.
“It’s up to the Greeks to solve the problem,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, the Eurogroup’s most influential member.
At heart of the problem is a demand by the eurozone that Greece deliver a primary balance, or surplus on public spending before debt repayments, of 3.5 percent of GDP.
The target is very high — and most countries do not even come close — but Germany and other eurozone hardliners are insistent that Greece reach it for several years after its current program concludes next year.
The IMF believes that hitting the long-term target will require debt relief and has also demanded extra commitments by Athens in case it falls short.
Greek Finance Mister Euclid Tsakalotos slammed these new demands as undemocratic.
“It is not correct to ask a country in a program to legislate, two or three years beforehand, what it will do in 2018,” Tsakalotos said.
Already huge, Greece’s debt hit 311 billion euros last year, or around 180 percent of output, according to the latest EU data.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
RSS