EARLIER this year it all looked so rosy. In April, just two years after Greece imposed the biggest sovereign-debt restructuring in history on its private creditors, it raised €3 billion ($4.2 billion at the time) in five-year bonds at a yield of less than 5%. In July its ten-year bonds were yielding less than 6% and their Spanish and Italian equivalents less than 3%, not far off Germany’s. The troubled economies of Europe’s “periphery” were beginning to turn around, it seemed, and the European Central Bank (ECB) would do whatever it took to keep the euro zone together.That all went out the window in the global market sell-off of October 15th-16th. Yields on Greek government debt briefly exceeded 9%; the spread between yields on German government bonds and those of debt-addled euro-zone countries widened and lower-rated corporate-bond yields rose sharply too. Part of the rise might have been due to bond markets’ declining liquidity. At any rate, some ground has since been regained, with corporate bonds especially buoyed by the rumour (later denied) that the ECB was about to buy corporate debt as part of an asset-purchase scheme.But worries that slow growth in the...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1oxtkxs
No comments:
Post a Comment