Merkel Says She’ll Pursue Market Rules, Credit Supply in 2010
Chancellor Angela Merkel said her priorities for 2010 include winning support for further regulation of global financial markets and avoiding a credit squeeze for companies in Germany.
“We can’t expect the economic slump to be over quickly,” Merkel said in a New Year’s speech for broadcast on nationwide television today, according to an advance copy released by the government. “Next year, many things will get more difficult before they get better.”
Business and government must cooperate to protect jobs in Europe’s largest economy after “the biggest global financial crisis of our time,” Merkel said. They also have to work together to ensure banks lend enough to business, especially to small and mid-size companies, she said.
Three German institutes that advise the government raised their forecasts for economic growth next year to as high as 2 percent on Dec. 16. Merkel’s government estimates gross domestic product will grow 1.2 percent in 2010 after a 5 percent contraction this year.
Merkel helped lead efforts over the past year to regulate financial markets. She pledged in her speech to “keep working resolutely for the introduction of new rules” to prevent “excess and a lack of responsibility” in the future.
On Afghanistan, she said an international conference in London next month “must create conditions so responsibility can be handed over step-by-step to the Afghans over the coming years.” She didn’t give details of plans for Germany’s nearly 4,400 Afghan-based troops under NATO command, the third-largest contingent in the country after the U.S. and the U.K.
Filed under: business by Specialist