A meeting of eurozone finance ministers ended this morning without agreement on how to pay the huge costs of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times reports. Italian and Dutch ministers had disagreed sharply over the idea of ‘coronabonds’ – a form of shared debt. Northern European governments were also unwilling to remove conditions on loans from the European Stability Mechanism, a fund that has been set up to help eurozone economies in difficulty.
Before the meeting started yesterday, more than 300 political scientists, historians, sociologists, economists and international experts from thirty European countries published an open letter to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The signatories, including two Nobel laureates, more than twenty MEPs, the former head of the International Atomic Agency and the general secretary of the European Trade Union conference, call upon Merkel to support the creation of European bonds to finance economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Here is the full text of the letter:
