All eyes on tense ‘euro crunch summit’
BELGIUM: EU leaders debate “a big leap forward” to strengthen their
union and save the euro at a two-day summit starting Thursday, but
divisions may scuttle efforts to bring the currency back from the brink.
European Union heads of state and government gather from 3:00 pm
(1300 GMT) as the debt crisis, now in its third year, widened this week.
Cyprus and Spain have joined the earlier victims of contagion -
Greece, Portugal and Ireland - in requesting aid. With Italy, the
eurozone's third economy, also threatened, the EU is under pressure from
world leaders to deliver a convincing plan to prevent a collapse of the
single currency, which would have unfathomable global repercussions. The
summit “is perhaps the most important since the foundation of the EU” 60
years ago, said the head of the global IFF bank lobby Charles Dallara.
“It's about winning back the trust and confidence of long-term
investors,” he told the German weekly, Die Zeit.
“I'm afraid they'll only allow themselves to be convinced by
comprehensive solutions.” The 19th summit since 2010, it has, like
others before it, been billed the mother-of-all-summits, a “last chance”
for the decade-old euro. Among short-term solutions is an ambitious pact
to kickstart growth by injecting 130 billion euros ($163 billion) into
floundering economies currently facing record unemployment of 11
percent.
For the longer term, leaders will be asked to sign on to a roadmap
toward tighter economic and monetary union over the next decade, the
first step to a banking union to be agreed by the end of this year. AFP |