adminminister warned yesterday, accusing the Europeans of acting too late to tackle the problem.
“The crisis is not being resolved satisfactorily. Perhaps the issue of Greece is being resolved, but now it’s Italy, which is a bigger problem than Greece,” Guido Mantega told reporters.
“Italy is a stronger country than Greece,” but markets operate on the basis of expectations and confidence and “the fact is that confidence is not being restored,” added Mantega, whose country is a member of the BRICS group of emerging powers along with Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Rumors that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi might resign triggered chaos on financial markets this week and led to record borrowing costs for the eurozone’s third-biggest economy.
Dealers said investors were betting that a Berlusconi resignation would spark a relief rally but could not say if any such gains would last given the likelihood that the markets would then worry if there was to be a power vacuum.
“The Europeans are still acting too late,” Mantega said, stressing that those emerging countries which “do not have high (foreign exchange) reserves were being hit with capital flight.”
Brazil itself was not being affected, he added.
“We have to deal with this, because if the emerging countries are affected (by the crisis), the world situation will worsen,” Mantega said.
He denied press reports that Brazil had, during last week’s G20 summit in France, offered to boost its contribution to the International Monetary Fund by US$10 billion to help Europe.
“We made no concrete proposal in terms of figures,” he said.
President Dilma Rousseff said at the G20 summit that Brazil would not contribute to a European rescue fund, although it was open to boosting the IMF’s resources to deal with the debt crisis. – AFP.
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