Debt crisis could still spread to EU core-IMF

FRANKFURT - Despite bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Europe's debt crisis could still spread to core euro zone countries and the emerging economies of eastern Europe, the International Monetary Fund warned on Thursday.

"Contagion to the core euro area, and then onwards to emerging Europe, remains a tangible downside risk," the global lender's latest economic report on Europe said.

The semi-annual IMF report said peripheral members of the euro zone needed to make "unrelenting" reform efforts to overcome the debt crisis and prevent it spreading further.

It also urged the European Central Bank to tread carefully on further rises in interest rates after last month's first increase since 2007, saying euro zone monetary policy could "afford to remain relatively accommodative".

The Eurocrats are getting increasingly sneaky and secretive about the measures they are planning in order to hold the EU Euro system together, and people in Europe are starting to get pissed off.

Geert Wilders of the Netherlands:

Ministers from the eurozone's biggest economies met on Friday to discuss Greece's debt situation, after which Athens and senior EU officials denied that the Greek government had raised the prospect of leaving the 17-member eurozone.
"It is a humiliation and an insult that The Netherlands is being bypassed for talks about Greece," Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration and eurosceptic Freedom Party, told news agency ANP on Sunday.
Wilders, whose Freedom Party supports the minority Dutch coalition government on various issues, said the Dutch government should not accept this and immediately stop paying Dutch taxpayer money to countries such as Greece.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the nationalist True Finns party has walked out of coalition talks over aid to Portugal.

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