Eurozone leaders seek better coordination

BRUSSELS - Germany and France pressed weaker eurozone countries to make their economies stronger to help pull the currency union out of its financial morass and gave their approval to strengthening the bailout fund that remains the bloc's first line of defense against the crisis.

But they held off for now on concrete economic proposals that could provoke political resistance, leaving a large raft of issues to sort through in coming weeks as financial markets wait to see results.

While Berlin and Paris presented their plans Friday as a sign of the bloc growing closer together - and reinforcing confidence in the shared currency - some think that the steps fall short of the bold steps many say are required to keep the euro safe and may even distract from more urgent crisis measures.

The Franco-German proposals "will be about improving competitiveness and at the same time making it clear that we have the political will to grow together," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told journalists, as she arrived at the summit of European Union leaders.

Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy shared their so-called "pact for competitiveness" over lunch with their European counterparts, where they also opened the door to a more immediate and, some say, pressing topic: boosting the size and powers of the eurozone's 440 billion bailout fund, known as the European Financial Stability Facility.

The conclusions of Friday's summit are the first written confirmation of the much discussed closer economic coordination among eurozone states and the overhaul and increase of the bailout fund, but the statements from eurozone leaders opened more questions than they answered.

At the summit lunch, Sarkozy and Merkel didn't detail their plans, which - as government officials previously indicated - might include calls for putting debt limits in national constitutions, raising retirement ages to match increased life expectancy, and getting countries to set up orderly ways to handle bank failures.

"It would have served the discussion if concrete measures" had been suggested, said Jean Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg.

What elements will be included in the pact - whether Paris and Berlin will push against resistance to dropping things like rock-bottom corporate taxes and automatic inflation-linked wage increases - and what new powers the bailout fund will get will be decided by the end of March, EU leaders said.

That leaves EU policymakers with a packed agenda over the next weeks, that includes not only the competitiveness pact and the fund overhaul, but also new bank stress tests, a final agreement on tougher budget rules, the detailed outline of a permanent crisis mechanism to succeed the EFSF, and decisions on whether to lower the onerous interest rates paid by Greece and Ireland for their multibillion euro rescue loans.

The result of these debates will determine whether EU leaders finally get one step ahead of the crisis, which has most often seen them cobble together solutions in hastily called overnight meetings.

EU policymakers have vowed to come up with a comprehensive solution over the coming weeks. But many economists are skeptical that the final plan will be enough to avoid a debt restructuring or more transfers of money from the region's rich states to the poor ones.

"Whatever the Grand Bargain proposals look like, they are likely to fall a long way short of the significant moves towards a proper fiscal union that are arguably necessary for the longterm survival of the single currency," analysts at Capital Economics in London wrote in a note Friday.

In theory, the Franco-German demands could help get weak economies in a position to start growing again, said Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies.

"The problem is, you can only do that if you survive the present crisis," said Gros. "And to that crisis they have not found a solution."

The kind of structural reforms envisaged by Merkel and Sarkozy take years to take effect and even then the debt loads of countries like Greece, Ireland and possibly even Portugal - set to remain above or around 100 percent for some time - will still seem unsustainable.

Although yields, or interest rates, on government bonds from those countries have fallen in recent weeks, they still reflect serious concern among investors that one or more of these countries may eventually default on its debts.

In recent days, finance experts, among them the chief economist of Deutsche Bank, have made several proposals on how to do a "soft" debt restructuring that limits market panic - including extending the maturity of government bonds or voluntary cuts to the total amount creditors are owed.

EU officials have so far ruled out any kind of debt restructuring, but have suggested ways the bloc's existing crisis strategy could be made more effective.

If decided, those measures would constitute a fundamental overhaul of Europe's strategy, which so far has revolved around offering expensive bailout loans to countries on the brink of bankruptcy in return for painful budget cuts.

Among the suggestions: letting the facility buy the bonds of vulnerable governments on the open market, thus stabilizing their price and borrowing costs; providing countries with a short-term liquidity line when one-off measures like expensive bank recapitalizations threaten to sink their finances (as with bailed out Ireland), or even lending them the money to buy back their own bonds.

Right now, bonds issued by cash-strapped states like Greece, Ireland or Portugal are trading at a discount due to doubts over the governments' ability to pay them back - theoretically making a buyback an easy way of cutting a country's overall debt.

To do that, the EFSF would likely need more money. Eurozone leaders on Friday reached a "consensus" to lift the fund's effective lending capacity to the 440 billion initially advertised, said Juncker, but again, how the new ceiling should be reached as left for later. At the moment, the facility can only lend about 250 billion due to various buffers required to make the EFSF's bonds attractive to investors.

On top of that, there's a push to cut the interest rates already bailed-out Greece and Ireland have to pay for their rescue loans.