BRUSSELS, Belgium — After weeks of pointing fingers at Athens for sparking a crisis in the eurozone, Brussels itself is being blamed for many years of passing the buck, so to speak.
Late Monday night came the most visible sign that the eurozone is taking a close look at its own processes.
“I’d like to apologize to the world at large that I wasn’t able to prevent a bad decision,” said Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker, referring to the fact that finance ministers, under his leadership, had previously rejected giving the EU statistics agency some fact-checking powers. “I’m sure we were wrong, I confess it,” Juncker said, “not to have looked closely enough at divergencies of competitiveness that we had noted in Greece and elsewhere … we hadn’t drawn all the operational conclusions that we might have drawn from that fact.”
The Eurogroup comprises the finance ministers of countries that have adopted the euro and has oversight of European Union matters affecting the eurozone.
Juncker’s humility was striking in a city full of blustery bureaucrats, but he may also be trying to head off accusations of hypocrisy.
As Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has become more frustrated with taking the heat for his country’s immense economic mess and its implications for the rest of Europe, he has hit back, saying there has been “quite a big effort in the European Union to hide their responsibilities behind Greece.”
Juncker noted a 2005 effort by the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, to equip the EU’s statistics agency Eurostat with the right to check up on figures submitted by member states. The recommendation was rebuffed at that time because finance ministers did not want to give up autonomy to the Luxembourg-based EU agency.
That decision allowed Greece to get away with submitting falsified finance reports and now allows the EU some degree of deniability. Despite his candid admissions, Juncker defended the EU by saying, “If we haven’t spotted everything that we should have spotted in the case of Greece, that’s not due to a lack of observation on the part of the commission or the eurogroup. It’s due to a Greek way of presenting figures which weren’t all ones we could validate.”
Even so, there was plenty of warning that Brussels’ suspicions should have remained on permanent high alert when it came to Greece: The country’s very entry into the eurozone was predicated on falsified figures.
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Posted by jakedog on February 19, 2010 06:56 ET
The Greeks brought this on themselves. They chose the path of socialism. Socialism does not produce wealth. It lives off whatever form of free market capitalism can manage to survive in its midst, be it legitimate or black market. The same thing is happening in America, but Americans are quick to spot the problem. Obama's stimulus plan has brought jobs to the public sector while the private sector has withered. The difference between Greece and America is Americans understand the danger of public sector growth. When the government is the biggest employer, it sucks the life out of the private sector which is where real wealth and prosperity are created. In America we will change course starting with the November mid term elections. Obama has already failed -- thank God. For Greece and Western Europe, the damage may be irreversible.
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