BASEL, Switzerland (MNI) – New emergency stabilization measures
announced early Monday morning by the European Union finance ministers
and the European Central Bank will be sufficient, International Monetary
Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said here today.

Asked whether the decisions taken would be enough to contain what
was threatening to become another full-blown financial crisis,
Strauss-Kahn replied: “we always think when we do something that it will
be enough, I think it is.”

The EU finance ministers earlier Monday announced a package of
loans and loan guarantees worth as much as E720 billion for Eurozone
members that run into trouble. Of that amount, E440 billion would be
made available by Eurozone member states, E220 billion by the IMF, and
an additional E60 billion would be from an EU-wide fund that already
exists and would not be all new cash.

Almost concurrent to the EU announcement, the ECB said it would
take the unprecedented step of intervening in public and private debt
markets, buying up securities with the aim of addressing segments of the
market it called “dysfunctional.” This would almost certainly include
the sovereign debt of peripheral EMU countries.

The ECB also said it was re-opening fixed-rate full allotment
tender procedures for 3-month and 6-month refinancing operations and
reactivating 7-day and 84-day U.S. dollar liquidity operations.

Financial markets responded favorably this morning to the news as
spreads on non-German sovereign Eurozone debt securities tightened and
the euro bounced.

“I think we have to wait a little more, but I think all this is
rather encouraging,” Strauss-Kahn said. “I think what has been done by
the Europeans yesterday is really a big step forward — bold measures,
those on the side of the EU and on the side of the ECB.”

He added that the IMF “will be happy to contribute” to any European
country that asks for help from the newly created fund “and at the same
time comes to the IMF asking for a program.”

The terms of any IMF funding under such circumstances would be
“broadly on the basis of what has been done in the past,” Strauss-Kahn
said.

–Frankfurt Newsroom, +49-173-315-6588; dbarwick@marketnews.com

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