sovereign debt crisis

According to Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Austrian banks had 18.1 billion euros of exposure to foreign sovereign debt at the end of October. The debt to which the banks were most exposed were Polish, Italian, German and Hungarian…

Swiss daily newspaper Tagesanzeiger is reporting that Fitch, the ratings agency, is about to downgrade six European countries because of the sovereign debt crisis. The paper says that six euro countries were put on ratings review in…

Fortunately the ECB has deep pockets, and as I argue in this post, these will probably suffice to keep short term bond yields down to acceptable levels, and help the banks fund themselves and recapitalise. What the ECB’s LTRO’s won’t do is…

Dollar is trading on its back foot following solid EZ debt auctions; IMF seeks to increase lending capacity. The key issue today is whether North American players will sell into euro bounce; 20dma seen at $1.2875. UK Claimant count better…

Despite the ongoing hawkish rhetoric from the ECB, there are signs that they are getting it: The LTRO can't work, as you're essentially just swapping one liability for another one (albeit more long term in duration, therefore making it…

Check out the below graphic which shows General Government Deficit/Surplus as % of GDP on the Y axis, Government Debt as % of GDP on the X axis, and the Government Debt in Euros as the size of the bubble. Pretty cool!

There has been a lot of discussion about whether China's growth will slow enough to be considered a hard landing and what that would mean for the global economy and investors. Below is an account from Bloomberg featuring Goldman Sachs Chief…

Greece and the IMF appear to be pushing for as much as a 75% loss on NPV basis, while the banks, many of whom have written down 50% of their Greek holdings, appear willing to accept a 60-65% hit on the NPV basis. Participating in the…

Perhaps the main point to take to heart from the events of the last week is the way the recent ECB liquidity measures have apparently been able to stabilise the debt crisis, at least for the time being, even while it is not clear that they…

The big news out of Europe on Friday was not S&P’s downgrade of 9 countries, France included. The ratings agency told us weeks ago that it might do this. No, much more important was the ECB’s saying in the bluntest possible terms that…