EU’s ‘Good Girls’ Can’t Keep Footing Debt Bill, Halonen Says
By - Mar 16, 2011 4:58 AM GMT-0300
Europe’s top-rated economies like Germany and Finland need to stop paying for the fiscal sins of the euro region’s weakest members if the bloc is ever to have a “fair system,” Finnish President Tarja Halonen said. “The good girls, like Finland and Germany, they are not the payers for the future,” Halonen, 67, said yesterday in New York in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Andrea Catherwood. “European citizens expect that there will be also a fair system inside the European Union and in the euro, and that’s why we have to have quite hard discipline.”
Finland, one of the single currency area’s six AAA rated members, has seen anti-euro sentiment swell as polls indicate taxpayers in the Nordic country are tired of supporting governments that have overspent. Though Europe’s leaders on March 12 agreed to boost the region’s bailout facility, they remain divided on how to do so in practice. Finnish Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi said March 9 her government wants the euro area to target stricter economic goals rather than allow “joint liability.”
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Comment: The EU is like marriage and in marriage it is where the bad boys learn how to behave. It may take some time, though, yet learn they will because a divorce is too costly.
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