The New Media Journal | EU Creates $1 Trillion Package to Save Euro

The New Media Journal | EU Creates $1 Trillion Package to Save Euro

The European Union put up a staggering $1 trillion Monday to contain its spreading government debt crisis and keep it from tearing the euro currency apart and derailing the global economic recovery.

Analysts said the huge sum supplied the "shock and awe" markets had been waiting for for weeks, at least in the short term, and the euro soared on the news.

European leaders negotiated into the early hours of Monday before reaching a deal in which governments that use the euro would join the EU and International Monetary Fund in putting up euro750 billion in loans available to prop up troubled governments.

The European Central bank will buy government and private debt to keep debt markets working and lower borrowing costs, a crisis measure dubbed the "nuclear option," while the US Federal Reserve joined with other central banks in the effort, reactivating a currency swap program used during the earlier stages of the financial crisis to ship dollars overseas to be pumped into banking systems as short-term credit.

Officials acted after ominous slides in world stocks and the euro last week that raised fears that the debt crisis would spread from heavily indebted Greece to other financially weak countries such as Spain and Portugal and beyond, to the point where President Barack Obama discussed the crisis by phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy last week.

Policy makers worried it could shake the world economy the way the bankruptcy of US investment bank Lehman Brothers did in 2008, making banks fearful of lending to businesses, hammering stocks and killing off economic recovery.

Many investors, rattled for weeks by the prospect Greece would default on its mountain of debt, showed relief. The euro climbed as high as $1.3064, up from the 14-month low of $1.2523 it hit late last week.

Japan's Nikkei 225 stock average rose 1.5 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index added 1.3 percent. European markets jumped higher — major indexes were up more than 3 percent — and Wall Street was also expected to surge on the open, with Dow futures also 3.0 percent higher.

There was cautious endorsement from analysts who still feared the measures may not be enough to save the common currency, which was adopted by many of the EU's member states in 1999.

"It buys time. We don't know if it will be enough. They're trying to give the impression that they're still united. They've bought some breathing space but that's all," said Song Seng Wun, an economist with CIMB-GK Research in Singapore. "This perhaps just postpones the inevitable, the euro may have to ultimately give way, that's the worst case scenario."