EU finance ministers on Thursday agreed on a 540 billion euros (US$591 billion) package of measures to combat the economic fallout of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is now up to EU leaders to approve the accord, which would require overcoming profound political disagreements.
In an emergency teleconference, the Eurogroup approved a plan to stave off what is expected to be a recession of unprecedented size.
The deal would lay to rest — at least temporarily — concerns that the EU was incapable of uniting behind a common strategy when it was most urgently needed.
Photo: AFP
In a sign of relief, ministers broke out in applause once a consensus was struck.
“Today, we agreed on three safety nets, and a plan for the recovery to ensure we grow together and not apart once the crisis is behind us,” said Portuguese Minister of Finance Mario Centeno, who heads the Eurogroup.
The common response includes a joint 100 billion euros employment insurance fund, a European Investment Bank instrument intended to supply 200 billion euros of liquidity to companies, as well as credit lines of as much as 240 billion euros from the European Stability Mechanism — the eurozone’s bailout fund — to backstop states as they go on a spending spree to help get economies back on their feet.
The ministers also agreed to work on a temporary fund that would help kick-start the recovery and support the hardest-hit nations, while not defining how it would be financed.
French Minister of the Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire said the fund could be decided on in the next six months and could total 500 billion euros.
All of it needs approval by EU government leaders as early as next week, and tensions persist.
With several key divisions papered over, disagreements are likely to resurface when leaders are called to sign off.
The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed Europe, with the continent suffering more than 65 percent of the worldwide deaths attributable to the coronavirus.
The scale of the damage shines a spotlight on the vulnerabilities of a union whose sense of common purpose has been tested over the past decade by the Greek debt crisis, an influx of refugees and Brexit, but the pandemic — in the words of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a veteran of many geopolitical fights — poses the biggest threat to the EU since World War II.
Europe’s more-frugal north is pitted against Italy and Spain, the worst-affected nations, in a climate of mistrust and simmering resentment.
Disagreements were laid bare earlier this week when finance ministers failed to agree on a joint response after 16 hours of bitter negotiations.
Things were different on Thursday.
The meeting was delayed by nearly five hours while key nations — including the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany and Spain — negotiated a compromise that would ultimately be uncomfortable to most, yet acceptable to all.
Once the meeting started, it took just 30 minutes to declare success.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS