Coffee

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FILE PHOTO: A coffee grower selects coffee fruits on a canvas in Chinchina
FILE PHOTO: A coffee grower selects coffee fruits on a canvas in Chinchina, Colombia November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez/File Photo

March 19, 2019

By Julia Symmes Cobb and Ayenat Mersie

BOGOTA/NEW YORK (Reuters) – A proposal by Colombian coffee growers’ federation that producer countries sell their high-quality harvests untethered from the New York market price could encourage buyers to look for alternative providers, importers and exporters said.

The federation in late February said it would discuss a possible unlinking from the New York benchmark price with other producers of high-quality arabica and buyers in an effort to sell coffee above production costs.

Prices on the New York market have hovered at or below $1 per pound so far in 2019. Last week, the most-active ICE arabica futures contract bottomed at a 13-year low of 94.65 cents per pound.

Brazil harvested a record-large coffee crop last year, and is on track to produce another massive harvest this crop year, despite it being the off-year in its biennial production cycle.

Colombia, which prices much of its coffee at a differential to futures, is proposing an unlinking that would set its prices between $1.40 and $1.50 per pound. The Colombian federation is already beginning discussions with other producers, it said.

But despite the proposal’s popularity with struggling growers, an alternative price could have buyers looking elsewhere.

“There was a time a while ago, when Colombia was so far above everyone else, quality-wise,” said Shawn Hackett, president of Hackett Financial Advisors, a Florida-based futures brokerage and research firm specializing in agricultural commodities.

“Nowadays, there’s some really good quality in Brazil, really good quality in Central America, in Africa.”

PAST EFFORTS

Colombia’s federation has long made the case to large buyers that it is in their interest to ensure producers earn a profit.

Colombian farmers need to make 760,000 pesos ($245.84) per 125-kg (275-lb) shipment on the domestic market to meet production costs, the federation has said. Prices were at 692,000 pesos per shipment on Monday.

Coffee price cartels have been attempted before, but failed.

An effort in 2000 to get coffee producers to hold back 20 percent of output until prices climbed to $1.05 per pound was scrapped after just a few producer countries – including Colombia – agreed to participate.

The higher the target price, the greater the incentive for those outside a price agreement to increase output, a United Nations report on the effort said.

Successful control of coffee prices will also require the participation of importers, who have largely ignored requests to pay more, despite warnings that farmers will switch crops if they cannot turn a profit.

Due to slumping prices and delays in certifying organic beans, coffee producers in Peru, for example, have been seen abandoning their crop to work on plantations that grow coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, the federation there said recently.

In 2013, some Colombian farmers even floated switching from arabica coffee – which is a smoother-tasting, more expensive bean – to the cheaper-to-grow robusta, which is used more in instant coffee.

“If the spread between the market and the prices that the Colombian exporters are trying to charge gets big enough, you will probably see a lot of people switch over to other origins,” said a U.S. importer. “People will become less dependent upon Colombian coffee.”

Colombian exporters agree.

“I don’t think the proposal is realistic,” said Giancarlo Ghiretti, of specialty exporter Caravela Coffee. “Selling large amounts of coffee outside of the market is difficult and risky. Large buyers will look to replace Colombia with other origins.”

The U.S. National Coffee Association said its members, who include major chains Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee & Tea, agree growth requires stability for farmers, but price controls are generally unsuccessful.

“While the pressure to find quick economic fixes is understandable due to current market dynamics, history shows that policies designed to control price ultimately hurt those they are meant to protect,” the industry group’s president Bill Murray said in an email.

Colombia produced 13.6 million 60-kg bags of washed arabica last year, more than any other country but down 4.5 percent from 2017. Dry weather is expected to help the crop recover this year.

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Bogota and Ayenat Mersie in New York; editing by Helen Murphy, Dan Flynn and G Crosse)

Source: OANN

FILE PHOTO: Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Gillibrand greets customers at Revelstoke Coffee in Concord
FILE PHOTO: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) greets customers while campaigning for president at Revelstoke Coffee in Concord, New Hampshire, U.S., February 15, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

March 17, 2019

By Ginger Gibson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand formally launched her presidential bid on Sunday morning, announcing she will deliver her first major speech next week in front of Trump International Hotel in New York City.

Gillibrand, who launched an exploratory committee earlier this year as a precursor, joins more than a dozen other Democrats who have already formally entered the contest to win the nomination to challenge Republican President Donald Trump in the November 2020 election.

“We need a leader who makes big, bold, brave choices. Someone who isn’t afraid of progress,” Gillibrand says in a video released Sunday morning to formalize her entry into the campaign. “That’s why I’m running for president. And it’s why I’m asking you for your support.”

Gillibrand, 52, had already been campaigning in key states that hold early primary contests. She has struggled to see her polling numbers increase in the wake of her initial announcement, a benefit some of her other opponents enjoyed after starting their campaigns. Gillibrand remains at 1 percent in most public opinion polls of the Democratic primary.

Gillibrand opted to use a video instead of a speech at a rally, the traditional method, to formally launch her campaign. She will travel on Monday to campaign in Michigan, followed by stops in key early contest states of Iowa and Nevada.

On March 24, Gillibrand will deliver a launch speech in her home state in front of Trump International Hotel in New York City, to take “her positive, brave vision of restoring America’s moral integrity straight to President Trump’s doorstep,” her campaign said.

The launch video released Sunday morning alludes to several policy debates, including immigration, gun control and climate change.

“We launched ourselves into space and landed on the moon. If we can do that, we can definitely achieve universal health care,” Gillibrand said in the video. “We can provide paid family leave for all, end gun violence, pass a Green New Deal, get money out of politics and take back our democracy.”

Gillibrand has sought to position herself as a unifying figure who can appeal to rural voters.

Some in the Democratic party believe an establishment figure who can appeal to centrist voters is the way to victory. Others argue a fresh face, and particularly a diverse one, is needed to energize the party’s increasingly left-leaning base.

Gillibrand was a member of the centrist and fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition while in the House of Representatives. Her positions became more liberal after she was appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton in New York when Clinton became former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

Gillibrand then won the seat in a special election and was re-elected to six-year terms in 2012 and 2018. She has attributed the ideology shift to representing a liberal state versus a more conservative district.

As a senator, Gillibrand was outspoken about rape in the military and campus sexual assault years before the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault first arose in 2017.

In late 2017, as she pushed for a bill changing how Congress processes and settles sexual harassment allegations made by staffers, some prominent party leaders criticized her for being the first Democratic senator to urge the resignation of Senator Al Franken, who was accused of groping and kissing women without their consent.

During the same period, Gillibrand said Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, should have resigned from the White House after his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment by the House. Some criticized the senator for attacking the Clintons, who had supported her political career.

(Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

Source: OANN

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke said Friday that he's not ready to release the amount of money he has raised since entering the 2020 race a day earlier.

When asked outside a campaign stop in Fairfield, Iowa, when he'd share his fundraising numbers, he said, "Soon."

"I don't have a definite plan," he added. "We're not ready to release them now."

The former Texas congressman entered the 2020 presidential race Thursday after months of speculation. He raised an eye-popping $80 million in grassroots donations last year in his failed U.S. Senate race in Texas against Republican Ted Cruz, all while largely avoiding money from political action committees. His early fundraising numbers will be an initial signal of whether his popularity during the Senate campaign will carry over to his White House bid.

So far, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has set the pace for grassroots donations in 2020, pulling in $6 million during his first day as a candidate.

Asked if he thought he would top Sanders, O'Rourke said only, "We'll see."

But his reception during his first Iowa swing was overwhelmingly positive, even as O'Rourke launched his campaign by hitting a handful of counties that had shifted from supporting Democrat Barack Obama to backing Republican Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Most of the towns O'Rourke visited during his first two days in the state were small and rural, manufacturing or farming towns. He kicked off his bid in Keokuk, population 10,300, dropped by a private home in Fairfield, a town about the same size, and jumped atop a coffee shop counter to address the crowd in Mount Pleasant, population 8,500.

The strategy set O'Rourke apart from the rest of the field, many of whom have focused their early swings on the state's population centers or on the traditionally blue counties that make up the bulk of the Democratic primary electorate.

Norm Sterzenbach, who's advising O'Rourke in Iowa, said the strategy came out of the Texan's desire to do more intimate events in his first swing through Iowa.

"He didn't want to do big rallies or big events. He wanted to get into communities and really talk to Iowans, and he wanted to go to smaller towns, smaller communities, and . places that had been neglected" by politicians, he said.

It was an approach reminiscent of his Texas Senate bid, where O'Rourke hit every one of the state's 254 counties, even the most rural areas, some of which hadn't been visited by Democratic candidates in years. O'Rourke didn't commit to visiting all of Iowa's 99 counties — what's locally known as the "Full Grassley," after Iowa's senior Republican senator, Chuck Grassley, who's famous for doing the full swing — but he said he planned to visit as much of Iowa as possible.

And like he did during his Texas Senate bid, O'Rourke didn't back down from some of his most liberal policy positions, telling an audience in Burlington, Iowa, that he was open to reconfiguring the Supreme Court, and a crowd in Mount Pleasant that he supports a "baby bond, an investment made in every single American dependent on your means" to help alleviate inequality, an idea first proposed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another presidential contender.

That go-everywhere, speak-to-everyone strategy brought him within 3 points of defeating Cruz in Texas, the nation's largest red state.

In Mount Vernon, Iowa — a town of 4,500 people — David Osterberg, a retired professor, was among a crowd of about 15 people outside the restaurant where O'Rourke spoke listening to his remarks on speakers blaring outside. While Mount Vernon sits in a Democratic county, Osterberg said he hadn't seen any presidential candidates come through yet, until O'Rourke did.

"It demonstrates that you care enough to come to a small town," Osterberg said. "Especially if you want to start breaking in to some of what happened in the last election, with many rural roads full of Trump signs, you want to come to places that are smaller, rather than larger."

In Fairfield, as a crowd of about two dozen gathered in a living room to eat lunch and see the candidate, O'Rourke was asked by a voter how he planned to defeat Trump.

"That depiction of Donald Trump as being unqualified was certainly not enough to win," he said. "So showing profound respect for the people that I want to serve by showing up first, by listening to them, by not writing them off by their party affiliation or how rural or urban their community is, is fundamental not just to winning but building the coalition, the consensus and the movement to get this stuff done long term."

Source: NewsMax Politics

Former Starbucks CEO and possible candidate for president Howard Schultz on Thursday apologized for saying he had spent more time talking to military servicemembers than any other candidate, including two veterans.

“I probably have spent more time in the last decade certainly than anyone running for president with the military,” Schultz said in an interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Thursday morning. “I’ve been to Okinawa, I’ve been to Kuwait. … I’ve been to the national training center in the Mojave Desert.”

“Yesterday I gave a speech on failed political leadership in this country,” Schultz tweeted Thursday afternoon. “A point I tried to make is that leaders must take responsibility and own their mistakes. Today I said I spent more time with the military than any candidate running for president. That was wrong.”

Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, are the two veterans running for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Gabbard is a member of the Army National Guard and served in both Iraq and Kuwait, and Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve who served in Afghanistan

Butigieg mocked Schultz for his statement later that same day.

“I remember a Green Beans Coffee at the exchange at Bagram, and a decent espresso machine run by the Italian NATO element at ISAF HQ. But I don’t recall seeing any Starbucks over there…,” he tweeted.

Source: NewsMax Politics

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke announced his campaign for president earlier this week in a video featuring his wife sitting silently beside him for the entire duration, drawing ire online, The New York Times reports.

The Texas Democrat announced his campaign on Thursday, in a three-minute video in which he spoke directly to the camera with his wife, Amy, by his side.

Audrey Gelman, co-founder of the women’s co-working space The Wing, wrote on Twitter: “i am so sick of wives being forced to silently gaze!!! why even include her? ?? when i run for president my husband will be in the background feeding our cats”

Activist Jamira Burley said, “Sooooo Beto had his wife sit next to him in a more than 3min video, only for her to hold his hand and smile for the camera.”
The Times notes the similarities between Amy Sanders O’Rourke, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who all frequently offered silent support for their husbands during important moments. By contrast Jane Sanders, wife of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of O’Rourke’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, gave an address at her husband’s first campaign rally of this presidential race.

Critics also seized on O’Rourke’s recent joke that his wife raises their children “sometimes with my help,” pointing out that no female candidate could make the same remark without repercussions.

“I like that Beto talks about his wife like she's a high school friend he enjoys running into at coffee shops, whereas I, A Human Mother, am a bad person if I can't spend 10 hours a day coloring and running flash cards while also putting in 80 un-distracted hours a week at my job,” writer Sady Doyle said on Twitter.

Source: NewsMax Politics

Former Starbucks CEO and 2020 presidential candidate Howard Schultz often describes his life as a rags-to-riches success story while telling how he grew up as a poor child in a tough housing project in Brooklyn who ended up founding a coffee empire, but his former neighbors don't remember it that way.

“It was a shiny, wonderful world,” said Elyse Maltz, 65, one of the many people who lived in Brooklyn's Bayview housing project in the 1950s and 1960s when Schultz lived there with his family, told The Washington Post. "You were interviewed to get in. My family was pretty well off."

Maltz said she wants Schultz to quit depicting people who lived in Bayview when he was there as poor or destitute, because "it's insulting."

Schultz wasn't interviewed for The Post story, but campaign spokesman Tucker Warren said that claiming his family wasn't poor is a comment on the state of today's politics.

“Other families at Bayview may have had more money or better jobs, but the Schultz family was poor, period," said Warren.

Shelly Blank, a longtime Bayview resident who runs a Facebook group for people who had lived there, said that in the early days, Bayview was "brand new, a beautiful new place with new kitchens, new plumbing. We’re excited that he’s running, but I yell at the TV when he says this stuff.”

Schultz himself has changed his description of Bayview over the years. In 1997, he described the project in his book "Pour Your Heart Into It" as "not a frightening place," but after that, his descriptions got darker.

Source: NewsMax Politics

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to the media at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pasay City
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to the media at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines, March 1, 2019. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez

March 11, 2019

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House senior advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt discussed Middle East peace prospects with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Monday in Washington, an American source familiar with the meeting said.

The 45-minute meeting took place at the Jordanian ambassador’s residence in Washington, the source said.

Kushner and Greenblatt returned recently from a tour of Gulf states during which they sought support from Arab leaders on the economic portion of a Middle East peace proposal that U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to unveil in coming months.

That trip, however, did not include a stop in Jordan.

King Abdullah is to meet lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, including a coffee with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The king also met on Monday with U.S. acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to discuss military and defense cooperation between Jordan and the United States.

“The meeting covered the latest developments in the Middle East, efforts to reach political solutions to regional crises, and efforts to fight terrorism within a holistic approach and Jordanian-US cooperation in this regard,” the Jordanian embassy said in a statement.

(Reporting By Steve Holland and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by David Gregorio and Meredith Mazzilli)

Source: OANN

A Nordea bank sign is seen at its headquarters in Helsinki
A Nordea bank sign is seen at its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, May 5, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

March 11, 2019

By Stine Jacobsen

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Tattooed models in mustard robes replaced the usual gray-suited bankers at Nordea Bank’s Copenhagen headquarters recently, as the Danish bank strutted out its latest attempt to woo young talent.

Hosting a fashion show is just one way companies like Nordea, the largest financial group in Nordic countries, are trying to attract twentysomething and thirtysomething employees. As financial services have moved online, banks have to battle with tech giants like Google and Amazon, which boast offices with features like massage rooms, to sign up tech-savvy millennials skilled in areas like artificial intelligence and programming.

“Banks today are not really banks like they were years ago,” Danske Bank’s head of real estate, Christian Ronn Osteraas, said in an interview. “Banks are more and more IT companies, so the fact that we compete for the same talents also means that we have to offer the same or better physical benefits and services.”

Workplace ambience is becoming increasingly crucial for banks in the quest for talent among youth who care about the environment and not just a juicy paycheck.

“Seventy-seven percent of millennials say that the workspace is more important than salary,” said chief operating officer Troels Bjerg at ISS, a top facility services firm whose customers include most of Europe’s 25 biggest banks.

Chief executives see attracting and retaining talent as their No. 1 challenge, according to data from ISS World, a Danish provider of facilities management, security, catering and other support services to companies globally.

“It has moved from being on the janitor’s agenda to the CEO’s agenda,” Bjerg said.

THAT START-UP FEELING

Nordea is also looking at places like Disney and Silicon Valley for inspiration to shed banking’s dusty image.

“It is important that you have something you can talk about when you get home,” said Trine Thorn, Nordea’s head of workplace management in Denmark. “We have to create something attractive and different. I want to have this start-up feeling.”

At Danske Bank in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital where it has 700 IT employees, you can nap in a booth in ‘The Library’ relaxation area or challenge colleagues at ping pong or PlayStation in another room.

Danske’s shared services center in Vilnius will stay when the bank pulls out of the Baltic countries and Russia in the wake of one of the largest-ever money laundering scandals.

Video games and flexible seating may not suit everyone, though.

“Everybody wants an inspiring workplace and the challenge might be that millennials have been highlighted so much lately,” Osteraas of Danske said. “It is important to attract talents of the future, but it should not remove focus from other types of employees.”

FROM CLEANER TO EXPERIENCE MANAGER

Nordea has been working closely with ISS to create a workplace that feels both like a bank and a tech start-up.

ISS, mainly known for its cleaning and catering services, said its new business for workplace experiences has been one of its fastest-growing areas in recent years. “Experience managers” create initiatives like a pop-up car wash in an office parking lot or a tour around the company to support knowledge sharing.

“My role is to help create a culture that’s more relevant to generation Z,” said Dino Portelli, an ISS experience manager contracted by a big global bank in New York.

Portelli is behind initiatives like a shuttle bus to the bank’s remote site, with a host onboard who can help employees book a meeting room, provide replacement pantyhose if needed, or pre-order coffee to be ready upon arrival.

“Banks are very corporate, but here it feels like you are in a Google (office),” he said of the site, which also includes a manicure salon and works with a local farm to supply greens.

“They arrive in their suits on Monday. By Wednesday they’re in slacks. And by Friday they’re playing ping-pong.”

(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen; Editing by Lauren Young and Richard Chang)

Source: OANN

A handout photo of a FedEx SameDay bot, an autonomous same-day delivery robot which will be tested this summer in Memphis and other cities
A FedEx SameDay bot, which will be tested this summer by FedEx and partners such as Pizza Hut, Target and Walmart for same-day delivery in some cities including Memphis, Tennesse, U.S., is shown in this handout photo provided February 26, 2019. Courtesy FedEx/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY NO RESALES, NO ARCHIVE

February 27, 2019

By Lisa Baertlein

(Reuters) – FedEx Corp this summer plans to begin testing a robot to handle home deliveries for partners ranging from Walmart Inc to Pizza Hut.

Shippers, retailers and restaurants are experimenting with robots, drones and self-driving cars in a bid to use automation to drive down the high cost of delivering gadgets, groceries and even cups of coffee the “last mile” to consumer doorsteps.

FedEx is teaming up with DEKA Development & Research Corp, whose founder Dean Kamen invented the Segway stand-up scooter and iBot stair-climbing wheelchair, for its project. The delivery company said the robots could become part of its SameDay service that operates in 1,900 cities around the world.

The battery-powered robots look like coolers on wheels. Cameras and software help them detect and avoid obstacles as they roam sidewalks and roadways at a top speed of 10 miles (16 km) per hour.

The project must win approval in test cities, including the shipper’s hometown of Memphis, and the first deliveries will be between FedEx office stores.

On average, more than 60 percent of merchants’ customers live within three miles of a store location. FedEx said it is working with its partners, which also include AutoZone Inc and Target Corp, to determine if autonomous delivery to them is a viable option for fast, cheap deliveries.

The “last mile” to the home accounts for 50 percent or more of total package delivery costs. Restaurants pay third-party delivery companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub commissions of 10-30 percent per order.

Investors and companies are pouring millions of dollars into projects aimed at lowering those costs and overcoming regulatory hurdles. For safety reasons, many states want autonomous vehicles to have humans as emergency backup drivers.

Starship Technologies, which has raised more than $40 million in venture funding, last year deployed robots to deliver packages in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In January, it teamed up with French food service company Sodexo to take Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Blaze Pizza orders to the 40,000 students at George Mason University’s Fairfax, Virginia, campus. That service costs $1.99 per order.

Amazon.com is testing its own delivery robot dubbed “Scout”.

FedEx rival United Parcel Service Inc is not testing robots – but like FedEx and Amazon, it is experimenting with drone deliveries.

Other tests include tie-ups between grocery seller Kroger Co and self-driving car startup Nuro, as well as DoorDash and General Motors Co’s Cruise Automation.

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Source: OANN

A man reads a newspaper at a coffee shop in central Athens
A man reads a newspaper at a coffee shop in central Athens, Greece, November 21, 2018. REUTERS/Costas Baltas

February 27, 2019

By Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Half of European Union countries are experiencing economic imbalances that differ widely, the EU Commission said on Wednesday, as the bloc discusses how to improve convergence among its 27 members after Britain leaves.

In a regular check-up of EU governments’ economic policies and achievements, the Commission renewed its warning that gaps that are harmful to the whole bloc not being addressed in several states, while a growing number of them face shortfalls.

As economic growth slows, “challenges vary significantly across countries and call for appropriate and determined policy action,” the Commission said in its report.

Thirteen states were rebuked for their economic imbalances, two more than in last year’s assessment.

Of them, Italy, Greece and Cyprus were found to have “excessive” shortfalls which would require swift corrective action. The Commission was mostly worried by the high ratio of bad loans in their banking sectors and their large public and private debt.

Bulgaria, Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, Croatia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Sweden also have imbalances although less acute than the three Mediterranean states, the commission said. Croatia’s imbalances are no longer considered excessive.

None of these countries have sufficiently narrowed the gaps the Commission had highlighted in a report last year, in a sign that EU’s fiscal recommendations have so far been largely ignored in national capitals.

Problems also differ among countries, with France affected by low productivity, Italy hit by high unemployment and debt and Germany lagging on investments.

CASH FOR REFORMS?

The EU monitoring was launched after the 2008-09 global financial crisis to address national economic imbalances that could weaken the EU economy.

However, major shortfalls have not been tackled by EU states. For example, Italy’s large public sector debt has not dropped and Germany has maintained an excessive trade surplus.

Structural reforms have also stalled in recent years in many countries of the bloc. “To unlock the full growth potential of our economies, we need structural reforms,” the Commission’s vice-president in charge of financial stability Valdis Dombrovskis said in a statement.

In a bid to address these shortfalls and lower economic divergences among EU states, the Commission last year proposed to set up a 25-billion-euro ($28.4 billion) EU fund to help countries that embark on structural reforms, such as of their pensions systems or labor markets.

Germany and France, the two largest countries of the bloc, supported the cash-for-reform plan in a blueprint agreed last week, but a fund will only be set up if there is backing from all EU states. Not all countries support the plan.

If agreed, the fund could begin financing reforms from 2021 when the new long-term EU budget will start.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)

Source: OANN


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