Multibillionaire financier George Soros said Monday Europe's leaders have three days to agree on how to fix the euro zone crisis ahead of this week's summit of world leaders -- a dramatically shorter timetable than the "three months' window" he said at the beginning of June that Europe's leaders had to fix their problems.
Unless that is resolved in the next three days, then I am afraid the summit could turn out to be a fiasco. That could actually be fatal," Soros said on CNBC Monday morning. Soros, who is quickly becoming an éminence grise on the topic of the euro zone financial crisis, was making an appearance following the publication of an editorial in the Financial Times, where he warned the negotiating stance of German chancellor Angela Merkel going into this summit "threatens to turn the June summit into a fiasco."
In his Financial Times piece, Soros, the notable hedge fund manager -- who last month delivered an explanation of the euro zone crisis to an Italian economics conference that went viral -- suggested the best way to proceed involves some kind of German guarantee of the peripheral countries' debt "in return for Italy and Spain undertaking specified structural reforms." The idea is to have some austerity combined with a German safety net for the debt of weak economies, stabilizing the economic crisis in the Continent so as to hopefully spur growth. It is a pro-unification framework that "will be the prelude to the establishment of a full political union and the introduction of euro bonds," Soros notes in his article.
Monday, that sympathy became strong criticism, with Soros writing in the Financial Times piece that "the main obstacle is in German politics, which is mired in a “can’t do” mode" and that the current policy path espoused by that country "will make Germany the centre of an empire and put the “periphery” into a permanently subordinated position."
International Business Times
No comments:
Post a Comment