Bolsas europeias regressam ao palco principal

[Be Cool]

Desculpem a minha inocência: Se as agências de rating passarem a ter que dizer de nós aquilo que queremos que digam, vão servir para quê?

A ideia de criar uma agência europeia é essa

Talvez não seja "a solução". Mas também ter agências que continuam a dizer aquilo que os outros querem que digam, também não será aceitável. A verdade é que alguma coisa tem de ser feita.

[Elias]

Desculpem a minha inocência: Se as agências de rating passarem a ter que dizer de nós aquilo que queremos que digam, vão servir para quê?

A ideia de criar uma agência europeia é essa

[Quico]

(...) Temos que romper o oligopólio das agências de 'rating' e controlá-las", afirmou Van Rompuy numa entrevista ao diário espanhol.

Desculpem a minha inocência: Se as agências de rating passarem a ter que dizer de nós aquilo que queremos que digam, vão servir para quê?

(Está tudo doido!... )

[atomez]

"Se as autoridades públicas querem continuar a ter a última palavra, então os políticos têm de atuar a nível europeu e internacional.

(...) Temos que romper o oligopólio das agências de 'rating' e controlá-las", afirmou Van Rompuy numa entrevista ao diário espanhol.

A política no posto de comando!

Todo o poder aos euro-sovietes! Já!

[srosa]

Van Rompuy diz que Europa tem de romper oligopólio das agências de rating

O presidente do Conselho Europeu, Herman Van Rompuy, afirma em entrevista ao jornal espanhol "El País" que a Europa tem de controlar as agências de 'rating' e romper com o seu oligopólio.

"Se as autoridades públicas querem continuar a ter a última palavra, então os políticos têm de atuar a nível europeu e internacional.

(...) Temos que romper o oligopólio das agências de 'rating' e controlá-las", afirmou Van Rompuy numa entrevista ao diário espanhol.

O dirigente, que já cumpriu metade do seu mandato como primeiro presidente do Conselho Europeu, sublinha que a Europa já tomou algumas
medidas neste sentido mas que tem de fazer mais.

Van Rompuy demonstrou-se ainda surpreendido com a decisão da Moody's na semana passada de cortar o 'rating' de Portugal em quatro níveis para um nível já considerado 'lixo' (fora da chamada escala de investimento), acreditando que o programa de Portugal se irá cumprir e lembra que "no passado as agências de 'rating' cometeram muitos erros e acarretam uma parte da responsabilidade pela crise imobiliária" que originou a atual crise financeira e económica.

[charles]

Charles disse:

Curioso , está a passar ao lado de Espanha

Curiosidade à parte, a Itália teve a última revisão de rating à quase 10 anos e a Espanha há pouco mais de 3 meses.

Curiosidade à parte, na Europa Paises importantes como a França, Alemanha e Reino Unido mantêm-se com a mesma notação de há uma década a esta parte.

[yabadoo]

EU stance shifts on Greece default
By Peter Spiegel in Brussels and Patrick Jenkins in London
European leaders are for the first time prepared to accept that Athens should default on some of its bonds as part of a new bail-out plan for Greece that would put the country’s overall debt levels on a sustainable footing.
The new strategy, to be discussed at a Brussels meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Monday, could also include new concessions by Greece’s European lenders to reduce Athens’ debt, such as further lowering interest rates on bail-out loans and a broad-based bond buyback programme. It also marks the possible abandonment of a French-backed plan for banks to roll-over their Greek debt.

“The basic goal is to reduce the debt burden of Greece both through actions of the private sector and the public sector,” said one senior European official involved in negotiations.
Officials cautioned the new tack was still in the early stages, and final details were not expected until late summer. But if the strategy were agreed, it would mark a significant shift in the 18-month struggle to contain the eurozone debt crisis.
Until now, European leaders have been reluctant to back any plan categorised as a default for fear it could lead to a flight by investors from all bonds issued by peripheral eurozone countries – including Italy and Spain, the eurozone’s third and fourth largest economies.
Yields on Italian bonds, which move inversely to prices, rose sharply last week due to the Greek uncertainty. Senior European leaders – including Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank chief, and Jean-Claude Junker, head of the euro group – are to meet top European Union officials ahead of Monday’s finance ministers’ gathering amidst growing fears of contagion.
A German-led group of creditor countries has for weeks been attempting to get “voluntary” help from private bondholders to delay repayment of Greek bonds, a move they hoped would lower Greece’s overall debt while avoiding a default.
But in recent days, debt rating agencies warned any attempt to get bondholders to participate would represent a selective default. Rather than abandon bondholder buy-ins, however, several European leaders have decided to return to a German-backed plan to push current Greek debt holders to swap their holdings for new, longer-maturing bonds.
The move essentially scraps a French proposal unveiled last month, which many analysts believed would only add to Greek debt levels by offering expensive incentives for banks that hold Greek debt to roll over their maturing bonds.
Officials said the Institute of International Finance, the group representing large banks holding Greek debt, has gradually moved away from the French plan and begun to embrace elements of the German plan.
“There’s some convergence in the banking community towards a more realistic plan than the French plan, which was out of this world,” said the senior European official. The plan criticised as being self-serving for the banks.
According to executives involved in the IIF talks, banks have pushed for a Greek bond buyback plan in return for agreeing to a restructuring programme, arguing that only if Greece’s overall debt were reduced could a sustainable recovery occur.
European officials said there was support for the proposal in government circles. The plan, originally pushed by German investors, including Deutsche Bank, could see as much as 10 per cent of outstanding Greek debt repurchased on the open market.
Since Greek bonds are currently trading below face value, such purchases would essentially be a voluntary “haircut”, since bondholders would accept payment for far less than the bonds are worth.
It remains unclear how a buyback would be financed, however. The European Commission has long pushed for the eurozone’s €440bn bail-out fund to be used for buybacks, but Berlin blocked the proposal.

[Elias]

A Itália e a Espanha ainda estão com as dívidas em High Grade. A ver vamos o que acontece...

[charles]

Curioso , está a passar ao lado de Espanha

Fica o ranking recente dos ratings atribuidos pela Moodys aos 27..... (se alguém puder postar algo idêntico atualizado seria ótimo)

[atomez]

Tem que ver com isto, de certeza. A crise europeia está para durar e aumentar muito mais...

Hedge Funds Move Past Greece With Bets That Sovereign Debt Crisis Expands

Hedge funds that trade bonds and loans are increasing bets that Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis will spread to Portugal, Spain and Italy, even after Greece won a temporary reprieve with 12 billion euros in aid.

“Nothing you’ve seen so far has dealt with solvency, just liquidity,” said Simon Finch, head of credit trading at CQS UK LLP, a London-based hedge fund that oversees $11 billion.

Finch, who has bought and sold corporate bonds and loans for 18 years, has stepped up trading in mobile-phone, utility and toll-road companies in the three countries. He expects their governments will be forced to slash spending to pay off lenders, slowing growth and reducing discretionary consumer outlays.

CQS is among the hedge funds that say investors are underestimating the odds of distress or even default not only by Portugal, whose credit rating was downgraded this week to junk status by Moody’s, but also by the bigger Italy and Spain. The funds are moving beyond a direct wager that sovereign debt values will tumble, targeting potential fallout in the corporate-debt market and the banking industry.

“We are on the verge of an economic collapse which starts, let’s say, in Greece, but it could easily spread,” billionaire investor George Soros said during a panel discussion in Vienna on June 26. “The financial system remains extremely vulnerable.”

Laying Low

Most hedge funds had been hesitant to make big wagers against European debt ahead of the parliamentary vote in Athens last week that led to the European Union approving the aid to Greece, said Omar Kodmani, senior executive officer at London- based Permal Investment Management, a unit of Legg Mason Inc. that has invested $23 billion with hedge funds on behalf of clients.

Finance chiefs of the 17 nations that use the euro also pledged to complete work on a second rescue package that could reach 85 billion euros ($122 billion) and would involve banks rolling over 70 percent of Greek bonds maturing by mid-2014.

“Most opinions on the euro zone and Greece were not very pessimistic,” Kodmani said. “People saw it as a problem that could be postponed, so there hasn’t been much negative positioning.”

Hedge funds had been reluctant to discuss any bearish trades they made for fear of sparking protests from regulators who view the investors as vultures. On July 5, European lawmakers called for restrictions on traders’ uses of credit- default swaps to profit from failures on sovereign debt they don’t own. Credit default swaps are a type of insurance that makes investors whole if a borrower fails to pay.

Assessing Austerity’s Impact

Now that an immediate Greek default has been avoided, investors are looking for ways to play continued distress among countries including Italy, the euro area’s third-largest economy, and Spain, its fourth. The extra yield investors demand to hold Portugal’s 10-year bonds over German bunds slipped 19 basis points today to 994 basis points from a euro-era record of 1015 basis points yesterday, when Moody’s cut the country’s credit rating four levels to Ba2, below investment grade.

Italian 10-year bonds fell today, driving the spread over German bunds to the most since before the euro was introduced in 1999. The Italian yield increased more than 5 basis points to 5.175 percent, pushing the difference over bunds to 221 basis points. The spread over German bunds for Spain’s 10-year bond was 265 basis points, up from 206 basis points a year earlier. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

One area where Finch has been trading is the debt of mobile-phone companies, whose ability to repay bonds and loans could be diminished by austerity-triggered economic slowdowns. If such companies were downgraded, the market would be flooded with junk bonds, causing prices to fall.

“If you crimp peoples’ spending, you’ll find that phone calls are surprisingly discretionary,” Finch said.

Market Overhang

Portugal Telecom SGPS SA (PTC), the country’s biggest telephone company, is rated one rung above junk, according to a presentation that Finch made to investors in May. In the event of a downgrade, its 5.8 billion euros of debt would equal about one-10th of this year’s forecasted issuance of 55 billion euros to 60 billion euros in non-investment-grade bonds.

Telecom Italia SpA (TIT), Italy’s biggest phone company, is rated two notches above high yield. In the event of a downgrade, it would equal half of this year’s estimated issuance, according to the presentation.

Finch is also looking at utilities and toll roads where prices charged to consumers are regulated by the government. Budget-cutting measures could keep the government from providing subsidies to corporations, which will then have to make up the gap between the cost of providing services and what people can pay for them.

“Our thesis is that the bad countries can make bad corporate debt,” he said.

Marathon Asset’s View

Marathon Asset Management LP, a $10 billion fund run by Bruce Richards, told investors in mid-June that it’s evaluating the purchase of portfolios of $1 billion or more of real estate and corporate loans from banks in Portugal, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom and Italy as they are forced to sell debt to raise capital, according to a presentation sent to clients.

Richards expects some countries to nationalize financial institutions and sell assets because the banks have borrowed too much money.

“The banking problem is acute throughout Europe, including the German, French and U.K. banks, which have begun to sell assets and raise capital,” Richards wrote in the 27-page presentation.

Marathon, based in New York, said it has already traded more than $1 billion gross market value of sovereign credit in the peripheral European countries this year, using both CDS and bonds.

Too Sanguine

Nick Swenson, who runs Groveland Capital LLC in Minneapolis, has been wagering on sovereign defaults in peripheral European countries since March 2010. He’s not concentrating on Portugal or Ireland. Instead his $10 million fund is buying credit-default swaps on Spanish and Italian government bonds, which are cheaper than those other countries and whose defaults would potentially cause more damage in the market.

“Italy and Spain seem to be outliers,” he said of the relatively robust prices of their CDS, which trade at 222 basis points and 307 basis points, according to data provider CMA, compared with 935 basis points for Portugal and 2,150 basis points for Greece. “People think they aren’t at risk of defaulting.”

Economic Inertia

Credit swaps pay the buyer face value if a borrower fails to meet its obligations, less the value of the defaulted debt. A basis point equals $1,000 annually on a contract protecting $10 million of debt.
While their economies are certainly more robust than Greece’s, Italy and Spain aren’t out of the woods, Swenson said.

“The scale of their economies creates an inertia that somehow raises the probability of something bad happening,” he said.

“The need to restructure the periphery and the quite reasonable demand that bondholders take pain will, in my view, happen,” said Swenson. “It’s not a radical view and yet prices of all non-Greek bonds seem to be too optimistic.

Al Moniz, portfolio manager at Fore Research & Management LP, a New York-based hedge fund with $1.9 billion under management, said he is “very bearish” on European sovereign debt and the region’s banks, though he declined to say how he was positioning his portfolio to take advantage of that weakness.

“We are still in the early stages of the European crisis,” he said. “It hasn’t even been 30 percent played out.”

[Mcmad]

Eles vão reunir para mostrarem que estão juntos e solidários quanto ao facto de não saberem o que fazer....

[PMACS]

Cheira-me que veem aí cortes de rating!

[PT_Trader]

Crise em Itália obriga a reunião de emergência


União Europeia em alerta máximo, agora que a crise chegou à terceira maior economia da zona euro.

A crise da dívida soberana não dá descanso aos responsáveis europeus. Agora é a Itália, a terceira maior economia da zona euro, a fazer soar os alarmes.

De acordo com a Reuters, o presidente do Conselho Europeu, Herman Van Rompuy, convocou para amanhã de manhã, em Bruxelas, uma reunião de emergência em que estarão presentes vários altos responsáveis comunitários: os presidentes do Eurogrupo, Jean-Claude Juncker, do Banco Central Europeu (BCE), Jean-Claude Trichet, da Comissão Europeia, Durão Barroso, bem como o comissário europeu dos Assuntos Económicos, Olli Rehn, num encontro que antecede em algumas horas a reunião mensal dos ministros das Finanças da zona euro.

Em causa está a súbita degradação das finanças italianas na última sexta-feira. Os juros da dívida transalpina dispararam para valores históricos, ao mesmo tempo que as acções do principal banco do país se afundaram devido aos rumores de que esta instituição financeira poderá chumbar nos testes de stress à banca europeia, que serão divulgados dentro de alguns dias. Uma tendência de queda acompanhada pela bolsa de valores italiana.

Apesar de ter uma dívida elevada e uma economia pouco dinâmica, a Itália tem conseguido manter-se fora do radar dos mercados, mas se esta situação se alterar e a degradação se mantiver ao ritmo registado antes do fim-de-semana, levando Roma a imitar Portugal no recurso à ajuda europeia, a zona euro poderá estar perante uma ameaça de uma dimensão para a qual os mecanismos de defesa criados até ao momento são claramente insuficientes.

Na opinião de João Duque, presidente do Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão (ISEG), esta é uma notícia preocupante. Pela urgência da convocatória e porque seria natural que os líderes europeus estivessem preocupados com Espanha, não com Itália.

O presidente do ISEG admite que par Portugal não são boas notícias, mas até podem beneficiar a economia nacional porque pode ser delineada uma solução global para a crise da dívida.

De recordar que o “incêndio” grego ainda não foi apagado e Portugal e Irlanda permanecem uma preocupação.



Daniel Rosário

http://rr.sapo.pt/informacao_detalhe.as ... did=164072

[PC05]

Espero que seja para tomar as medidas que já deviam ter sido tomadas há meses!!!!!

[Elias]

UE marca reunião de emergência entre altos responsáveis da zona euro

10.07.2011 - 16:00 Por Pedro Crisóstomo
publico

O presidente do Conselho Europeu, Herman Van Rompuy, convocou uma reunião de emergência em Bruxelas para a manhã desta segunda-feira, do núcleo duro da zona euro, antes de um encontro dos ministros das Finanças do Eurogrupo, à tarde.

A zona euro vai tentar, amanhã, avançar com o dossier mais urgente que tem em mãos – o da Grécia – na reunião do Eurogrupo marcada para as 15h00 (14h00 em Lisboa). Mas para a parte da manhã foi agendada, à última hora, uma reunião entre os responsáveis de topo da zona euro.

À porta fechada vão estar o presidente da Comissão, Durão Barroso, o presidente do Eurogrupo, Jean-Claude Juncker, o presidente do Banco Central Europeu, Jean-Claude Trichet, e o comissário responsável pelos Assuntos Ecómicos e Financeiros, Olli Rehn.

O porta voz de Van Rompuy, Dirk De Backer, disse à agência AFP tratar-se não de uma “reunião de crise”, mas de um encontro para concertar posições, “como já aconteceu no passado”.

A Reuters noticiava que o motivo da convocação da reunião seria, para além da questão grega, os receios de que a crise da dívida contagie Itália. A informação não foi confirmada pelo porta-voz de Van Rompuy.

Os juros das obrigações do tesouro italianas estão a subir desde o início de Julho e, na última sexta-feira, intensificaram-se os sinais de que a terceira maior economia da zona euro pode estar mais próxima de começar a ser afectada pela crise das dívidas soberanas na periferia do euro.

As taxas de juro na maturidade de referência (a dez anos) tocaram nos 5,3 por cento, caminhando para o limite de 5,5/5,7 por cento que os analistas consideram ser a linha de risco semelhante à da escalada dos juros que levou às intervenções externas, primeiro na Grécia, depois, na Irlanda e, por último, em Portugal. E também na sexta-feira o maior banco italiano, o Unicredit, viu as suas acções caírem 7,9 por cento.

O encontro dos ministros das Finanças deverá girar sobretudo em torno da discussão sobre o envolvimento do sector financeiro privado no segundo pacote de assistência financeira que a zona euro está a desenhar para a Grécia.

Uma proposta francesa nesse sentido prevê genericamente o prolongamento da maturidade de 70 por cento dos títulos detidos em obrigações. Foi com base nesta proposta que os bancos privados alemães acordaram com o Governo de Angela Merkel a participação no novo plano de auxílio externo a Atenas. Mas a agência de notação financeira Standard & Poor’s já avisou que vai considerar que a Grécia entra em incumprimento selectivo, caso o novo pacote financeiro preveja essas condições.