from Al Jazeera:

Hungary-born billionaire warns European unity under threat if EU members do not work together to support weaker states.

Billionaire financier George Soros has said the European Union could break apart in the wake of the new coronavirus pandemic unless the bloc issued perpetual bonds to help weak members such as Italy.

The novel coronavirus, which emerged in China last year, has stalled swaths of the global economy while governments have ramped up borrowing to levels not seen in peacetime history.

Soros, 89, said the damage to the eurozone economy from the new coronavirus would last “longer than most people think”, adding that the rapid evolution of the virus meant that a reliable vaccine would be hard to develop.

The hedge-fund veteran and chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC said perpetual bonds, used by the British to finance wars against Napoleon, would allow the EU – itself created out of the ashes of World War II – to survive.

“If the EU is unable to consider it now, it may not be able to survive the challenges it currently confronts,” Soros said in a transcript of a question-and-answer session emailed to reporters. “This is not a theoretical possibility; it may be the tragic reality.”

The comments were approved by Soros for publication on Friday, a spokesman said.

Soros, who earned fame by betting against the pound in 1992, said that with major countries such as Germany selling bonds with a negative yield, perpetual bonds would ease a looming budget crunch across the bloc.

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