BRUSSELS — With the excruciating work of inking a deal to contain their two-year debt crisis over, European leaders turned Thursday to a potentially more difficult task: implementing the agreement that asks banks to take on bigger losses on Greece’s debts and aims to boost the region’s arsenal against market turmoil.
World stock markets surged Thursday on the news that the leaders had clinched a deal everyone hopes will keep the currency union from unraveling and prevent the crisis from pushing Europe and much of the developed world back into recession. But analysts were more cautious, noting that the deal remains vague and its success hangs on the details.
In the predawn hours of Thursday, after the deal was unveiled, leaders claimed victory. But by evening, they were cautioning that their work has only begun.
“We found a good overall package for the next stage, but I think that we still have many more stages to go,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
Cracks already were showing not even 24 hours after the deal. In an interview on French television channels TF1 and France-2, President Nicolas Sarkozy defended the deal as necessary to save the eurozone but took a dig at Greece.
“It was an error” to let Greece join the monetary union in 2001, he said, during the interview aimed at explaining the agreement to the French public. “Its economy was not ready to take on an integration into the eurozone.”
Earlier Thursday, Sarkozy called his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, and pledged to cooperate to revive global growth.
There was no word on whether Beijing might contribute to Europe’s bailout fund. Sarkozy said in his interview Thursday night that he would welcome any investment but that Europe didn’t need China to save it.
“The proof is that we saved it without the Chinese,” he said.
