Finance Ministers for Greece and Germany Find Little Commonality-NYT 2/5 : 독일과 그리스 재무부 장관 EU 구제금융 협상 결과 요악과 전망

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By MELISSA EDDYFEB. 5, 2015

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Wolfgang Schäuble, left, the German finance minister, and Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, hold a joint news conference after a private meeting Thursday in Berlin.Credit Michael Kappeler/European Pressphoto Agency

BERLIN — The new Greek government's debt-diplomacy tour of European capitals hit another rough patch on Thursday, as the country’s new finance minister and his German counterpart groped for common ground in their first meeting. They even failed to reach an agreement on whether or not they disagreed.

The Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has been petitioning important European officials to help Athens find relief from Greece's staggering debt, much of which it owes to the rest of Europe. A crucial goal for Mr. Varoufakis is to renegotiate the terms of repaying the 240 billion euros, or $274 billion, the country received in two international bailouts.

In a joint news conference here on Thursday after their private meeting, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister who helped to draw up the agreement that Mr. Varoufakis would now like to revise, sought to praise his new counterpart. He stressed their common desire to find a solution for Europe and described the talks as “open and intense.”

Mr. Schäuble said there had been no discussion of debt reduction or timing of the Greek payment, as the intention of the talks had not been focused on reaching a solution, but that they had “agreed to disagree” on several points as a way forward.

But even that description served as a departure for dissent. “We didn’t agree to disagree,” Mr. Varoufakis told reporters. “We agreed to enter into a discussion for a joint solution for all European partners.”

Their cordial but fraught encounter came the day after another vital player in the Greek debt drama, the policy board of the European Central Bank, dealt Greece a setback by shutting off a major source of lending for the country’s troubled financial institutions. That apparent rebuke came after Mr. Varoufakis met on Wednesday with the central bank’s president, Mario Draghi, in Frankfurt.

But Berlin’s role is just as crucial to Greece. Germany is the largest holder of Greek debt among eurozone countries. And the regimen of austerity budgets that have been a condition of Greece’s receiving bailout loans — and that the new Greek government blames for the country’s battered economy and high unemployment — have long been supported by Mr. Schäuble and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, as the best way for Greece to extract itself from debt.

Germany is the eurozone’s fiscal enforcer, largely responsible for imposing severe spending restrictions on Greece and other countries that became overly indebted before the financial crisis began in 2007. Many Germans regard Greeks as the most fiscally irresponsible on the Continent and think they must now suffer the consequences.

Mr. Varoufakis, despite backing off from his election-campaign calls for a reduction in his country’s debt, has nevertheless steadfastly pushed to find a way to ease the economic pain for average Greeks.

In impassioned remarks that he prepared before the meeting and read at the news conference, he appealed to Germany’s sense of morality, drawing a parallel between Greece’s problems and its economic crisis of the 1930s that helped pave the way for the rise of the Nazi party and World War II. Mr. Varoufakis urged more time to come up with a new economic program for his country.

 

Mr. Schäuble, in his own remarks, more than once urged Mr. Varoufakis to uphold Greece’s existing commitments to its international creditors, reminding him that, “Reliability is the prerequisite for trust.”

As the financial markets absorbed the Greek developments, stocks in Athens on Thursday shuddered early, but regained some of the lost ground in late trading. The main Athens stock index fell 3.8 percent, led by an 8.5 percent decline in bank shares.

But bond prices stabilized, with the yield on the 10-year Greek government bond, which moves in the opposite direction of the price, edging down to 9.33 percent after earlier in the day climbing above 10 percent. That neared its recent peak of 10.8 percent on Jan. 30, in the wake of the Greek election.

The divergence of the Greece and Germany's economic fortunes is stark. Germany has the lowest unemployment rate in the euro currency block, at 4.8 percent, while Greece’s at 25.8 percent is the highest.

Germany has a budget surplus and can sell government bonds at negative interest rates — meaning that investors essentially pay for the privilege of lending money to that government as a safe way to store their money. Greece, meanwhile, is still trying to create a functioning tax collection system and has the highest debt in the eurozone as measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. On Thursday, investors were demanding an interest rate of almost 20 percent on Greek government three-year bonds.

New economic data released on Thursday only underscored the distinctions. The Federal Statistical Office in Germany said factory orders rose 4.2 percent in December, much more than expected, driven by rising demand at home and abroad.

But European forecasters cut the expected growth for Greece this year to 2.5 percent, from 2.9 percent, saying that could only be reached on the condition of “full implementation of the program” agreed to with the country’s European creditors.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting from Frankfurt.