German Chancellor Angela Merkel balked at committing to direct sovereign debt purchases through the euro-area bailout fund, pushing back on calls by the bloc's leaders who support the measure as a way to ease the crisis.

Such a move, while legally possible, “is not up for debate” at present, Merkel said yesterday in Berlin. French President Francois Hollande championed the idea of using the European Stability Mechanism to purchase indebted countries' bonds as a way to counter rising yields. Just returned from the Group of 20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, Merkel said: “I haven't heard about such things.”

“There is no concrete planning that I know about, but there is the possibility of purchasing sovereign bonds on the secondary market,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin after meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. “But this is a purely theoretical statement about the legal situation.”