Greece has begun talks for ending IMF aid to the country, but is set to continue to have routine post-bailout reviews by the Washington-based group, a Greek official said after talks with IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Sunday.
The IMF is deeply unpopular in Greece for insisting on austerity cuts under Greece’s multibillion US dollar EU/IMF bailout, and Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras hopes that cutting ties with the IMF will help turn around his flagging political fortunes.
Greek leaders told the IMF that the crisis-stricken nation could quit its rescue program more than a year early when officials met in Washington.
Greek Minister of Finance Gikas Hardouvelis told Lagarde that Athens can do without further loans, which have propped up the nation’s economy since it came close to crashing on a mountain of deficit and debt in 2010.
“We don’t need the rest of the money that from the start of next year we were on course to get from the current memorandum. We can leave it one-and-a-half years earlier ... that is our goal,” Samaras said.
Aid disbursements from the IMF had been due to expire in March 2016, in contrast to funds from eurozone countries, which end this year.
At 240 billion euros (US$304 billion), the lifeline was the largest rescue program in global financial history and was aimed at preventing the debt crisis that affected Athens from spreading to the rest of the eurozone.
Samaras denies that Greece now wants an acrimonious divorce from the IMF.
The organization, perhaps more than the EU, has insisted on tough reforms and austerity measures in return for the rescue funds.
The tightening has exacerbated a six-year recession, the worst on record, left a quarter of the workforce unemployed and seen support for Samaras’s fragile coalition fall.
Hardouvelis, who met Lagarde with Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras, presented a plan detailing the nation’s ability to cover its financing needs from bond markets.
“Everything is on the table, the discussions have started ... we will have a relationship with the IMF, but not under the same conditions,” a Greek Ministry of Finance spokesperson said.
Last week, Lagarde said she believed Athens would continue to require aid before it could go it alone.
“The country would be, in our view, in a better position if it had precautionary support,” she said. “So we are talking about evolution in the relationship, but we believe that the relationship can still be extremely helpful for the country to move on.”
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS