Sunday July 12, 2015
Kaieteur News
Euro zone ministers demand more from Greece for loan talks
(L-R) Spain’s Economy Minister Luis de Guindos, Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde attend an euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium, yesterday. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir BRUSSELS (Reuters) Skeptical euro zone finance ministers demanded yesterday that Greece go beyond painful austerity measures accepted by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras if he wants them to open negotiations on a third bailout for his bankrupt country to keep it in the euro. Ministers lined up to vent their anger at Tsipras on arrival at their umpteenth emergency weekend meeting on Greece’s acute debt crisis, with Athens staring into an economic abyss when financial markets reopen tomorrow unless it wins fresh aid. EU officials forecast a deal would be reached by the end of the weekend to keep Greece afloat, but two sources said there was consensus among the other 18 ministers that the leftist government in Athens must take further steps to convince them it would honor any new debts. Tsipras won parliamentary backing early yesterday for a tough reform package that largely mirrored measures previously demanded by its international creditors but rejected by Greek voters at his behest in a referendum last Sunday. Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of its biggest
creditor Germany and a stickler for the EU’s fiscal rules, said negotiations would be “exceptionally difficult”. Emerging optimism about Greece had been “destroyed in an incredible way in the last few months” since Tsipras won power, Schaeuble said. A German newspaper reported that his ministry was suggesting that Greece either improve its proposals quickly and transfer state assets worth 50 billion euros into a fund to pay down debt, or take a fiveyear “time-out” from the euro zone. The German Finance Ministry declined to comment on the report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. But several officials said no one raised the possibility of a Greek euro exit in the meeting, which took a pause after three hours.
Other ministers arriving for the Eurogroup session spoke of a fundamental lack of trust after years of broken Greek promises and six months of erratic and provocative behavior by the radical leftist Tsipras government. “We are still far away,” said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who was chairing the meeting. “On both content and the more complicated question of trust, even if it’s all good on paper the question is whether it will get off the ground and will it happen ... We are facing a difficult negotiation.” However a preparatory meeting yesterday endorsed with reservations a recommendation by EU institutions and the IMF that Tsipras’s proposals did provided a basis to launch negotiations, sources familiar with the session said.
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U.S. firms’ thirst for quick profits hurts workers, Clinton will say Reuters - Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will argue in a speech tomorrow that U.S. businesses are too fixated on short-term profits, especially on Wall Street, and she will pledge to help workers get better pay and more family-friendly workplaces. Clinton, the favorite to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the November 2016 election, intends the speech to outline the economic theory underpinning her campaign, in which she has promised to be a champion for “everyday Americans.” Her nearest rival for the nomination, the socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has drawn large crowds and has been steadily narrowing Clinton’s lead in polls by staking out positions that reflect the leftward shift of their party’s base. Speaking at a historically progressive university in New York City, Clinton will say the size of the U.S. economy is best increased by policies that directly enrich the middle class, not by allowing wealth to accumulate among the richest few, according to an overview of the speech provided by her campaign and interviews with advisers. The details and costs of her proposals will be made public later, the campaign said. This delay may add to complaints, especially from her party’s progressive wing, that her platform remains too vague to appraise. Teresa Ghilarducci, an informal campaign adviser and a labor economist at the New School, where Clinton will give her speech, said the economic platform was not radical, but will show how her
campaign pledges so far fit together in a coherent model. “It’s a substantial argument that the government needs to complement private investment, and together they lead to economic growth,” she said. Take Clinton’s expected call for federal support of universal pre-school, Ghilarducci said: in the short term, it helps free up toddlers’ parents who want to work; in the long-term, it produces a more skilled workforce, she said. Steve Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has helped design the flat-tax plan espoused by Rand Paul, a Republican senator for Kentucky running for president, said Clinton’s proposals would likely hinder the economy and she would struggle to convince voters their stagnant fortunes might change. “She’s going to have a hard time selling a program of increasing middle class incomes when the president she worked for lowered them,” he said, referring to Clinton’s stint as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. On financial institutions, a favorite target of the left, Clinton has demurred to date on whether big Wall Street banks should be broken up by separating commercial banking from investment banking, as some in her party
Hillary Clinton have called for as necessary to avoid a repeat of the 20072009 financial crisis. But outside advisers to the campaign say she is expected to defend at a later date the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, which has been attacked by Republicans since its 2010 passage, and even say that it does not go far enough. Clinton will say that laws and the tax codes reward financial trading too generously, while undervaluing other industries, such as construction and manufacturing. Her rival Sanders has suggested increasing the tax rate for the richest Americans to more than 50 percent. Clinton has spoken only of reforming the tax code so the rich pay a fair share.