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Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Europe: More Record Yields, S&P sees more Downgrades coming

by Calculated Risk on 3/08/2011 01:15:00 PM

Bloomberg reports that Moritz Kraemer, S&P managing director of European sovereign ratings said more downgrades are possible and that a Greek default is "a possibility.” No surprise. (no story yet)

From Reuters on the March 11th summit: EU summit to take only minor steps on debt crisis

The top item on the agenda for the 17 heads of state and government is to agree a "competitiveness pact", a deal Germany and France are pushing the rest of the euro zone to adopt to show their commitment to overhauling their economies.
From the WSJ: Expectations Low for EU Talks
"There will be an agreement because one has to be reached. But I fear that it will not stand up to market expectations, and this could intensify debt problems in the euro zone in the future," said a senior euro-zone government official who is party to the talks.

"Germany will likely get less than expected in the competitiveness pact so, it will give less as far as the EFSF is concerned. And this is where the problem lies."
The next meeting of all 27 EU leaders will be in Brussels on March 24th and 25th.

The EFSF end in mid-2013, but the two year yields are already showing significant stress. The Irish 2 year yield hit a record 8.1% this morning, and the Greek 2 year yield is at 16.4%.

More records for ten year yields too. The Greek ten year yield is at 12.8% (up sharply today). The Irish ten year yield is 9.6%. And the Portuguese 10 year yield is 7.6%. All new records.

Here are the Ten Year yields for Spain, and Belgium (record 4.35%).