Greece and its lenders should quickly approve a review of reforms the indebted country must take in return for unlocking new loans, a senior EU official said yesterday, warning of financial instability in the eurozone if the issue lingers.
“Now is not the time to turn the clocks back to financial instability,” Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission and the EU’s financial services chief, told Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
“The reforms in the program are aimed at improving the competitiveness of the Greek economy and to give Greeks hope of a stable and secure future,” he added.
Greece and its international lenders made substantial progress in talks on Friday to bridge differences over reforms.
Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem said the talks on Friday brought all sides close to a stage when lenders can send a mission of experts to Greece to prepare a report on the completion of the batch of reforms.
Such a staff level agreement would then pave the way for a decision by eurozone finance ministers to disburse new loans to Greece, without which Athens would default on its debt in July.
Juncker, in an interview aired on German radio Deutschlandfunk yesterday, praised Greece for some of the steps it has already taken.
“No country has managed bigger steps to improve competitiveness than Greece,” he said.
However, Juncker also said that the bailout program, Greece’s third, could fall apart as the IMF has not yet made up its mind whether to take part in providing more aid.
“Yes, it is on a shaky ground in the sense that we don’t see how the International Monetary Fund could manage this problem,” he said.
The IMF has sat on the sidelines of the latest bailout program and says it cannot participate in a program which could keep Greece in a never-ending cycle of indebtedness that could push national borrowing to 275 percent of economic output by 2060.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Saturday said he believed drawn-out bailout review would be completed positively, but repeated that Athens would not accept “illogical” demands by its lenders.
Further cutbacks, particularly to pensions which have already gone through 11 cuts since the start of the Greek debt crisis in 2010, would be hard to swallow, Tsipras said.
“We are ready to discuss anything within the framework of the [bailout] agreement and within reason, but not things beyond the framework of the agreement and beyond reason,” Tsipras told a meeting of his leftist Syriza party. “We will not discuss demands which are not backed up by logic and by numbers.”
He warned all sides to “be more careful toward a country that has been pillaged and people who have made and are continuing to make, so many sacrifices in the name of Europe.”
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last