German chancellor Angela Merkel said today that Europe will do everything to secure the stability of the euro, which has come under pressure in the euro zone debt crisis.
She added that reform and stability will remain on the euro zone's agenda next year as the bloc fights to secure the single currency and make its economies more competitive.
"We will do everything to secure the financial stability of the euro as a whole," Mrs Merkel said at a news conference after a European Union summit.
EU leaders have spent most of 2010 trying to come up with successful measures to stop the region's debt crisis spreading, but Greece and Ireland have already been forced to seek EU bailouts and Portugal, Spain, Belgium and others are now in the spotlight.
Mrs Merkel said she was impressed with the reforms implemented by Spain and Portugal.
Meeting in Brussels, EU leaders agreed to try to lengthen the maturities of new sovereign bond issues and confirmed that private investors would be involved in the future euro zone rescue mechanism, a draft summit statement showed.
Yesterday, they finalised plans for a permanent €750 billion financial safety net due to be in place by 2013. Mrs Merkel said the fund would be sufficiently large.
"The more coherent economic policies are, the more we see by 2013 that states have made progress with a culture of stability, the lower the financial extent of the (rescue fund) will have to be," she added.
Mrs Merkel declined to comment on whether a discussion on proposals to issue joint euro bonds would continue.
She also told a news conference that the crisis mechanism was an expression of solidarity.
Reuters