“Efforts to resolve the two-year-old European debt crisis swung back to world leaders after euro-area officials boosted a firewall designed to overcome doubts about their crisis response and to lure additional emergency aid.
Finance ministers from the 17-member monetary union unveiled a package over the weekend that included 500 billion euros ($667 billion) in fresh bailout funds on top of 300 billion euros already committed to rescue programs, which together topped the symbolic $1 trillion mark. The total doubles when more than 1 trillion euros lent by the European Central Bank to aid the region’s banks is included.
“The political commitment to the euro zone is increasingly clear, and the ECB has shown that, in the final analysis, they’ll do what they have to do,” Erik Nielsen, chief global economist at UniCredit SpA (UCG), wrote in a note yesterday.
Group of 20 nations that rebuffed German-led pleas for more aid in February will be asked to decide this month whether European leaders have done enough to warrant increased resources from the International Monetary Fund. Euro-area finance ministers insisted at a meeting that ended March 31 in Copenhagen that they’ve fulfilled their side of the bargain.
“Europe has done its part” and that augurs well for talks at the IMF spring meeting on April 20, French Finance MinisterFrancois Baroin said at the meeting in the Danish capital.
