BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? President Barack Obama will offer what guidance he can on how to resolve the European debt crisis when he meets the EU's top officials at a summit in Washington next week, the U.S. ambassador to the EU said on Tuesday.
Obama will hold talks with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, who represents the EU's 27 member states, and Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, during the one-day summit on November 28.
The discussions will focus on the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, which over the past two years has hit Greece, Ireland and Portugal and now threatens Spain, Italy and France, three of the euro zone's four largest economies.
"We fully expect that when President Obama sits down with presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso, there will be a lot of discussion about this because it affects us all so profoundly," U.S. Ambassador William Kennard told reporters.
"The outcome of this crisis is pretty unpredictable, I think that's fair to say. We have offered our advice and counsel and I hope it's been helpful."
During the G20 summit in Cannes on November 3-4, Obama joined a small group of EU leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for talks on the crisis, which is having an increasingly debilitating impact on the global economy and on U.S. financial markets.
At that meeting, Obama and his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, received a first-hand account of the depth and intensity of Europe's problems and offered some guidance on how the United States handled its banking and subprime mortgage crisis during 2008 and 2009.
Kennard said Obama would again offer any advice he could, but said it was ultimately a European crisis and one that Europe had the resources and wherewithal to resolve on its own.
"We have been proffering some ideas... and we have made some suggestions over the course of the crisis, but those suggestions I think are better made privately," Kennard said.
"That has been our strategy all along, to quietly offer suggestions and solutions. Frankly, from our perspective, it really isn't helpful for us to be advocating publicly different solutions.
"But if you sort of categorize them, really what they are is: a more significant firewall -- and there's lots of ways that that can be done obviously -- and then to recapitalize the banks, and then to deal with peripheral countries that are in a tenuous situation."
AN ECB MORE LIKE THE FED?
Europe is in the process of recapitalizing its banks, with the European Banking Authority calling on 70 banks to find around 100 billion euros of extra capital by the middle of 2012 to build a sufficient buffer against the crisis.
At the same time, euro zone governments are working on how to scale up their bailout fund, the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility, to make it better able to handle problems in Italy, Spain and possibly other states.
But none of the proposed steps has yet convinced deeply skeptical financial markets that Europe's politicians have the crisis in hand, with yields on the government bonds of France, Italy, Spain and Belgium pushing to near record highs -- a reflection of the high risk attached to the countries.
Many analysts say the only possible resolution at this point is for the European Central Bank to take a much more active role in combating the crisis, buying at-risk sovereign debt in unlimited quantities and effectively acting as a lender of last resort to the euro zone.
That is not in the ECB's statutes, however, and Germany is strongly opposed to treading on the ECB's independence.
Asked if the role the U.S. Federal Reserve played in tackling the U.S. subprime mortgage collapse could be emulated by the ECB, Kennard was reluctant to offer prescriptions.
"Obviously, in the depths of our crisis, we were able to use the Fed in ways that are different from the way Europe is able to use the ECB," he said.
"That's a very fundamental difference in our structure and it's playing out in this crisis. We're watching very intently what the ECB is able to do and the potential for it to do more, but it's not our place. We don't have a vote on this."
carrie underwood eric church martina mcbride sara evans lionel richie cma awards cma awards
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন