Regling, Chief Executive of the European Financial Stability Facility, responded to Wolfgang Münchau's article, "Europe’s bailout bazooka is proving a toy gun", in the FT.
Describing Europe’s financial efforts to resolve the sovereign debt crisis as a “toy gun” is wrong and unfair. Since the outbreak of the crisis, Europeans have disbursed and committed almost €1 trillion to protect the financial stability of the eurozone: through the first and second Greek package, the Greek private sector involvement (PSI) operation, the Irish and Portuguese programmes, the European Central Bank’s secondary market purchases, €250 billion in uncommitted EFSF resources, and a commitment to provide €150 billion to the International Monetary Fund. The European efforts have been augmented by the IMF, and may be raised further at the meeting of the Eurogroup on Friday.
The ECB’s longer-term refinancing operations are not included in these figures, nor any leveraging options that the EFSF has prepared and for which significant amounts have been committed by large investors. To compare these efforts with a “toy gun” is simply inappropriate.
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