Deficit gains, debt pain for eurozone

While the eurozone made dramatic inroads into its fiscal deficit deadweight last year, slashing it to 4.1 percent of GDP from 2010’s 6.2 percent, total public debt went up almost another two percentage points.

Eurostat’s figures show one of the costs of fighting the financial crisis; the eurozone’s debt has climbed. Remember all that “quantitative easing”, that printing of money? Well, it is all on loan, hence the bigger debt.

Figures can only explain so much; consider the suffering of the Irish, Portuguese and Greeks and their impressive reductions in budget deficits; the first pair more than halved theirs, while the Greeks rubbed out nearly 10 percent of the red ink.

Their reward was debt climbing to respectively 106, 108, and 170 percent of GDP.

Copyright © 2013 euronews