Meirelles says Greece today is similar to Brazil in past

São Paulo – The president of the Central Bank, Henrique Meirelles, declared that the present crisis in Greece is similar to the problems that emerging nations, like Brazil, had in the past. Like Greece today, in the past Brazil had to get help from the International Monetary Fund, pointed out Meirelles.
“There’s no doubt that the public debt crises today, such as the Greek problem, is similar to what happened to emerging nations in the past. There was a high level of liquidity followed by a surge in public debt and then a liquidity squeeze with the result that it became very hard to finance the debt.” Meirelles says that there are interesting factors in the Greek crisis. “They belong to the European Union and share a common currency. But the EU does not have a monetary or exchange rate policy.”
Meirelles declared that Brazil was well prepared to face the 2008 crisis and that the cost to the country of overcoming the Great Recession was much less than in many other G-20 nations even though it was a dangerous situation. “In 2008, we had a crisis characterized by a lot of unknowns. That was what paralyzed the financial system,” declared Meirelles.

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