ATHENS | March 30, 2015 | By Manos Giakoumis via MacroPolis | Following the Eurogroup decision on February 20, Greece returned 10.9 billion (European Financial Stability Fund) EFSF bonds at the end of the previous month. That transaction reduced accordingly the country’s debt and the debt to GDP ratio by more than 6 percentage points.
MADRID | In the dialectics of the confrontation about how much of a national rescue is the aid package being draft by Brussels for Madrid and Rome, politics has so far played the upper hand. Apparently, governments in Spain and Italy would attempt to depict any coming bailout under a different light than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal so their parties can avoid the stigma of having failed their…
MADRID | The financial City of Madrid was coming Monday to the conclusion that a rapid intervention from the European Central Bank would be the only effective barrier to support Spanish sovereign bonds in the markets. The alternative of using the assistance programmes of rescue funds European Financial Stability Facility and European Stability Mechanism to buy debt in the primary and secondary markets had pushed aside the ECB recourse. This…
While waiting for the changes the European rescue fund needs to introduce in order to recapitalise the banking sector directly, especially the Spanish one, JP Morgan’s global equity department has made an interesting answer-question list with the main doubts that everybody could have concerning this instrument. The starting point could be the role of the European Financial Stability Facility /European Stability Mechanism until the last European Summit. Up to that…
LONDON | It is a raging war what today burns within the Madrid-Rome-Berlin triangle, and with the survival of not only the European common currency but the future of the United States of Europe at the epicentre of the negotiations. Painful obedience has evolved into a tense, dynamic partnership. The stiff stillness imposed by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the most powerful economy representative has for once been broken…
MADRID | The relaxed atmosphere in a seaside resort has undoubtedly helped coming to terms with a number of common sense goals. But delivery might prove more gruelling than expected. You don’t need to cross the Atlantic and be lectured by President Obama to concede that unwinding the feedback between financial and sovereign risks stands as a key requirement. Or to accept that current Spanish and Italian risk premium should be…
Analysts at JP Morgan released Wednesday an 11-point note with the main questions triggered by the ongoing partial rescue plan to support capital needs of the Spanish banking sector. We are passing them on to you, but we think 8 is particularly interesting as it means Spanish taxpayers are pushed to the front line, and 11 is ironic, as we suspect the Spanish conservative government was unaware it was lending a…
By Julia Pastor, in Madrid | Ratings agency S&P’s threat of downgrading the euro zone and the EFSF has fallen like a ton of bricks among leaders and European institutions. Santander analysts believe, however, that it has also been accepted with a certain degree of realism: “The German Minister of finance, Schäuble, commented that the warning is the best incentive to promote a solution to the crisis and regain the confidence…
We’ve opened a little simple section, ‘From all corners of the web’, which you can check on the left end of our front page. As we are (sort of) the new kid on the street, we feel terribly curious about, well, almost everything we hear here, so in addition we hope you’ll like these link selections that will be posted over each weekend. And as always, our comment widgets are anxious…
One would think it’s all rumours and half-baked drafts more akin to belong to a neverending script than to the global finances’ reality, but that doesn’t prevent financial institutions from making a serious effort to analyse possible and probable results of their implementation. JP Morgan says “The possibility that any important news/measure comes out of some of the many meetings/summits that are planned for the next week and a half,…