On Crisis Anniversary, Athens Tear Gas Defies Merkel’s Stability
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On this day in 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was working on her second-term tax cuts and French President Nicolas Sarkozy was preparing a speech on territorial reform. With the euro at an uncomfortably high $1.49, then-European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet was set to go to China for currency diplomacy.
Near midnight on that Sunday in Athens, a two-week-old government announced that the year’s budget deficit would hit 30 billion euros ($39 billion), six times more than the 5 billion euros it had expected.