Helsinki and Vienna brace for Grexit or euro break-up

Finland is preparing for a full-blown currency crisis as tensions in the eurozone mount and will not tolerate further bail-out creep or fiscal union by stealth, reports The Daily Telegraph on its front page. The daily quotes an interview with the country’s finance minister Erkki Tuomioja, in which he is reported to have said –

There is a consensus that a eurozone break-up would cost more in the short-run or medium-run than managing the crisis. There are no rules on how to leave the euro but it is only a matter of time. Either the south or the north will break away because this currency straitjacket is causing misery for millions and destroying Europe’s future. It is a total catastrophe. We are going to run out of money the way we are going. But nobody in Europe wants to be first to get out of the euro and take all the blame.

In Austria, an interview with Michael Spindelegger, the vice chancellor, foreign minister and leader of the conservative ÖVP party, is splashed on the front page of Kurier under the headline “Cheaters out of the euro zone”. he told the Vienna daily –

We need more ways of kicking someone out of the monetary union; countries that do not uphold commitments. If these rules existed, we would already have felt the consequences.

However, experts who were quizzed about Spindelegger’s proposal, the daily reports that a Grexit would result in “unpredictable costs” for the EU and the risk of a euro-collapse “as the exclusion always hits the weakest, and anybody can be the weakest sometimes”. The comments come two weeks after an interview with Bavaria’s Finance minister Markus Söder in Bild created a buzz when he said Greece should leave the eurozone this year.