Tuesday 30 March 2010

EUobserver - 'Greek deal receives mixed response from markets' by Leigh Phillips

The EU rescue deal for Greece agreed at the bloc's summit last week has received a mixed response from markets.

Initially, German bunds fell and Greek bonds rose, narrowing the spread between them in a sign that confidence in Athens was returning.

Bunds saw their biggest weekly decline early Saturday since 5 March after EU leaders reached a Franco-German brokered deal that would see a mixed mechanism of International Monetary Fund and EU-member-state bilateral loans at market interest rates - but only as a last resort.

Markets reacted circumspectly to the Greek bail-out scheme (Photo: artemuestra)

Market commentators suggested that confidence was returning, but in early Singapore trading on Monday (29 March), gold fell 0.2 percent as uncertainty returned over speculation that Greece is not out of the woods.

Athens must head to market to borrow some €15.5 billion by the end of May, possibly triggering a fresh crisis over the country's debt.

Greece aims to borrow around €5 billion this week alone.

Separately, in a sign that some saw the "last-resort" conditionality hidden within the EU deal as evidence that nothing had changed, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's announced it would not alter its rating of Greek government debt.

In Germany meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been hailed by newspapers and commentators as the "iron chancellor" for her hard bargaining at the EU level in forcing through acceptance of IMF bail-out monies rather than a Europe-only strategy.

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Posted via web from Hexham Matters

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