President Anibal Cavaco Silva called for urgent action to halt the
“recessionary spiral”, warning Europe’s leaders that the current course had
become “socially unsustainable”.
In a speech to the nation, he said Portugal would “honour its international
obligations”, but in the same breath called for a tough line with the European
Union-International Monetary Fund Troika over the pace of fiscal tightening
under Portugal’s €78bn (£63bn) loan package. “We have arguments, and we should
use them firmly,” he said.
“Fiscal austerity is leading to declining output and lower tax revenue. We
must stop this vicious circle,” he said, cautioning the Troika that there would
be no way out of the crisis until policy was set in the interests of the
“Portuguese people” as well as foreign creditors.
His sombre speech was a reminder that Europe’s crisis is far from over.
Portugal’s jobless rate has risen from 13.7pc to 16.3pc over the past year,
reaching 39pc for youth, even before the full impact of austerity hits.
3 comments:
So desperate is the scramble for profit that traders will bet on two flies crawling up a wall at the moment. It'll go down again for the simple reason that nothing much has actually changed.
Short term profit is their only driver and as such they charge around like toddlers chasing a football.
The now overlapping debt crises that stalk the world wil not go away until we change the nature of our monetary system.
While the money we use is private bank credit as it is now - we shall always have debt and yet more debt. Then a collapse.Then a bail out.
But the ability of the taxpayers of even whole soverign nations to keep picking up the tab for these collapses is all but exhausted.
It is our debt based monetary system that is under going a slow motion collapse before our very eyes. Postponements and debt rescheduling won't change the inevitability of its fall
Any stock market rise that ignores that is as irrelevant as putting fairy lights on the sinking Titanic.
The Euro will survive even if the ECB has to kill Europeans and recycle them into Euro notes, bit like Soylent Green only bank notes instead of food. Interesting fact on the EU today, they have ordered all the cash machines in the Vatican City to be turned off because the Vatican has failed to comply with anti money laundering regulations. Is this the shape of things to come.
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