enviado por Julio Marques Mota
Sarkozy wants a summit, but Merkel does not want to go
- There were unconfirmed reports about an EU summit yesterday, as requested by several leaders, including Nicolas Sarkozy;
- Angela Merkel is much less keen on the idea but circumstances might force a decision soon;
- another extraordinary day on the markets yesterday, as Italian 10-year yields push through 6% at one point;
- Willem Buiter says Italian re-rating is game changer, as this becomes a systemic crisis;
- German Bild tabloid agrees, for the sake of Italy;
- Zapatero calls on Germany in particular to make greater efforts at crisis resolution;
- at yesterday’s Ecofin consensus emerged that some form of selective default is unavoidable for Greece, which would be part of the second loan package;
- on the table is the proposal for Greece to buy back its bond at 50% discount for roughly €70bn with EFSF money;
- The second loan package for Greece would then need to be bigger than €115bn ;Wolfgang Münchau says situation extremely grave as leaders need to do a lot more than agree a Greek package to get out of this crisis;
- as politicians call for a private sector participation, Moody’s has downgraded Ireland to junk, citing policy signals as among the reasons;
- Ewald Nowotny says rating agencies add no analytic value or understanding, and express only view, which are damaging to the eurozone;
- Giulio Tremonti seeks Italian parliament to approve his austerity package by Sunday revamped to include privatisation and liberalisation plans;
- some IMF directors have expressed concern that Italy’s budget savings are mostly backloaded, and thus not sufficiently credible;
- EU finance ministers promissed support for banks that fail the stress tests;
- First leaks of test results to be presented on Friday find that six Spanish bank and one Austrian and a Greek bank failed the stress test;
- IMF warns Germany of low growth trend;
- the French Greens, meanwhile, elected the Norwegian born Eva Joly as their candidate for the French presidential elections.
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Reuters reports that there will be an emergency EU summit this weekend, following another day of awful news for the eurozone. Italian 10-year yields shot through 6% at one point, before settling at 5.7% in the afternoon, on the news that Giulio Tremonti headed back for talks with Italy’s opposition, amid signs that the Italian parliament may be passing Mr Tremonti’s budget with a few days.
Yesterday’s highly volatile trading underlines the markets’ acute nervousness in the eurozone’s third largest economy. Moody’s downgrade Irish debt to junk status, citing concerns over a selective default of Greece.