Enter your email address:

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Soros Says Euro Bonds Wouldn’t Solve Debt Crisis Without Reforms

Billionaire investor George Soros repeated his support for euro bonds to fight Europe’s sovereign crisis, saying joint debt liability would lower the cost of borrowing for individual euro member states.

Common euro-area bonds alone can’t solve the crisis, now in its fourth year he said at the Global Economic Symposium in Kiel, North Germany.

“We need both, euro bonds and structural reform in individual countries,” said Soros.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose Christian Democratic bloc last month recorded its best election result in 23 years, repeatedly rejected the notion of debt mutualization in the euro area, arguing that these would create the wrong incentives for debt-laden states and damp their appetite for economic-policy changes.
“Euro bonds are a powerful taboo,” said Soros. A guarantee to borrow at a fixed euro-bond rate would reduce the need to transfer aid to debt-laden southern European states because the guarantee would never be called, he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-01/soros-says-euro-bonds-wouldn-t-solve-debt-crisis-without-reforms.html
GEORGE SOROS BLOG

Popular Posts


George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. His father was taken prisoner during World War I and eventually fled from captivity in Russia to reunite with his family in Budapest. Soros was thirteen years old when Hitler's Wehrmacht seized Hungary and began deporting the country's Jews to extermination camps. In 1946, as the Soviet Union was taking control of the country, Soros attended a conference in the West and defected. He emigrated in 1947 to England, supported himself by working as a railroad porter and a restaurant waiter, graduated in 1952 from the London School of Economics, and obtained an entry-level position with an investment bank.

In 1956, Soros immigrated to the United States, working as a trader and analyst until 1963. During that time, he developed his own theory of markets called 'reflexivity', which he has laid out in his recent books THE ALCHEMY OF FINANCE and THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 2008 AND WHAT IT MEANS. In 1967 he helped establish an offshore investment fund; and in 1973 he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds, through which he accumulated a vast fortune.