mr president our duty is to look for the best solutions to cope with the crisis to which end the learning process is of great value
my feeling is that we have learned why things went wrong and how we got ourselves into the difficult situation we are in today but my feeling is also that now we are less open to drawing lessons from the evolving reality
in this context i would like to raise two issues
first we can see great similarities between member states with regard to public debts and deficit ratios while at the same time for the same member states there are substantial differences between the risk premiums paid on their sovereign debt
in my view this is clear proof that factors other than sovereign debt enter into the picture and influence markets
among other things it is foreign debt or excessive external imbalances on which markets have focused and this clearly means that in responding to the situation we must go beyond fiscal adjustment
the second issue is related to the fact that those economies that are the most strongly affected by the crisis have to cope with a combination of high risk premiums and severe austerity measures
this double challenge makes achieving debt sustainability practically impossible
if we reject debt restructuring then we need a better balance between punishment and assistance and the design of response packages which would make it possible to avoid pushing countries further into a debt trap
