German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble hopes that after supporting Europe in the crisis, the IMF will soon concentrate on the rest of the world again. Europeans are able to take care of their own problems, he says.
Translated from the German
German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has called for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to step back from its involvement in the euro crisis. The IMF was not established "to help Europe permanently", Schäuble told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The IMF has been involved in Europe since 2010, helping to finance billions in loans to the financially unstable states of the eurozone, such as Greece or Portugal. For this, its chief Christine Lagarde has repeatedly interfered and spoken out against austerity policies in the EU, mainly promoted by Germany, that the IMF considers are impeding growth.
Schäuble told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he assumed that after completion of the rescue programmes in the eurozone the IMF would focus on its core tasks again. However, the involvement of the IMF in the Greek "troika" had been the right decision. "No other institution has such expertise in sovereign debt issues and reform programmes", he said.
Klaus Regling, the head of the ESM euro crisis fund, has expressed similar criticism of the IMF for its latest assessment of the current aid for Greece. The IMF said in an interim report that the expectations for the effect of the first aid programme in the spring of 2010 had been far too optimistic. EU Commission president Barroso also told journalists in Brussels that there were sufficient technical and financial resources in the EU and within the eurozone to stem rescue programmes in future.
Full article (in German)
© Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH
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