EU leaders seek new rescue plan

Marketplace Staff Dec 16, 2010
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EU leaders seek new rescue plan

Marketplace Staff Dec 16, 2010
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STEVE CHIOTAKIS: More worker protests in Greece. More ratings downgrades across Europe. Apparently the European debt crisis hasn’t reached its apex. And leaders across the continent today are grappling with renewed fears of dominoing debt.

From London, reporter Anne-Marie McNerney has more.


ANNE-MARIE MCNERNEY: After a year of multi-billion dollar bailouts for Greece and Ireland, Europe is in gridlock again. EU leaders are meeting in Brussels to come up with a new way of rescuing countries in debt. The meeting comes as Spain faces investors. The country is selling its debt today and the market’s appetite could provide a good test of whether Europe is out of the woods or back in the thick of it. Investors are debating whether the future of the Eurozone is at risk.

ANDREW HILTON: I don’t think this is the crisis that is going to blow the Eurozone apart. But I don’t think they haven’t resolved the problem. They’ve merely kicked it a little further into the long grass.

Andrew Hilton is an economist at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.

HILTON: It affects the United States in that the EU is its biggest trading partner, and to see the Euro under pressure means the dollar will be under pressure the other way.

Setting up a permanent system for handling crises after 2013 is one of the options being considered at today summit, but how that system will work is still unclear.

In London, I’m Anne-Marie McNerney for Marketplace.

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