Dutch Budget Deficit Threatens to Top 3%
Saturday, December 6th, 2003It looks like I’ve gotten my comeuppance for my recent preoccupation on these pages with next summer’s European Cup football championship – and with clam penises (yes, sad but true). Edward over at “A Fistful of Euros” has scooped me on the prospect that has now arisen that the even the Netherlands government’s budget deficit might slip above the Stability Pact’s 3% limit – this when it is the Dutch finance minister Gerrit Zalm (apparently known in internal EU circles as Il Duro, or “the hard-assed one” in Italian) who is raising the biggest stink about Germany and France not meeting that obligation for three years in a row now. He scooped me when I’m the one who lives in Holland!
Fortunately, our division of labor still holds – I can take a look into the Dutch on-line press to see what is being written locally about this predicament. (Frans Groenendijk, in comments to Edward’s post, already examines what Zalm has written on the subject in his own (i.e. Zalm’s) weblog. Frans has one, too.)
Coverage in the NRC Handelsblad is extensive, while in some of the other, more down-market papers it is missing entirely – this is a complicated financial affair that risks making Dutch eyes glaze over in boredom, I guess. For those interested nonetheless, a good place is to start is in their lead article. (more…)
