Where there’s a will. there’s a way.
- Friday’s talks on EU budget rules only start of the process
- Main objectives are to reach greater budgetary discipline, make rules more effective
- Divergences in competitiveness must be reduced in EU (good luck on that one!!)
- There has to be an effective crisis menchanism – – all finmins agreed
- Economic governance must be strengthened to act faster, more efficiently
- Before summer, EU finmins will meet twice more, report for EU leaders on JUne 17
- No EU finmin proposed orderly debt restructuring mechanism for the short-term (well that’s a plus, talk about sending wrong signal)
- Spanish and Portuguese governments took very important courageous steps, others ready to follow
- Sense of urgency on reform so great that electoral calendar of secondary importance
- Work on EU budget rule reform must be as far as possible within current EU treaty as treaty change tough
- There was broad agreement on having financial and non-financial sanctions sanctions for breaking EU budget rules
- Discussion of sanctions was about more than what is in EU rules now
