Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2016

Greece, Not Italy, Still Poses Biggest Challenge to Eurozone

A crisis in one country only becomes a crisis for the whole eurozone when a collective European response is required, Simon Nixon writes

The Wall Street Journal

By SIMON NIXON
Dec. 7, 2016 3:27 p.m. ET
4 COMMENTS
Not for the first time this year, the doom-mongers have been confounded. The Italian referendum over the weekend resulted in a resounding defeat for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who promptly announced his resignation. Yet the sky didn’t fall in, the euro dipped and then rallied, and Italian bonds and bank stocks barely budged. Other European assets were also largely unmoved.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Markets stabilise after Italian referendum

5-12-2016
BBC

The euro was hit after Mr Renzi announced his intention to resign. At one stage the euro hit $1.0505, its lowest level against the US currency since March 2015.
But it rebounded from that low to stand at $1.0634, a fall of just 0.3%.
Shares in Italian banks opened lower before recovering ground.
The troubled Monte dei Paschi was down by more than 5% in the first few minutes of trade, but then rebounded and had edged into positive territory. Shares in Unicredit and Intesa also fell sharply at first before recovering.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Greece to continue bailout talks, aiming to finish before December 5

Tue Nov 22, 2016 | 1:42pm EST

Reuters

Greece will continue talks with international creditors on fiscal and labor reforms, aiming to wrap up the second review of its bailout program by early next month ahead of a euro zone finance ministers' meeting, government officials said on Tuesday.

Mission chiefs of the creditor institutions overseeing the program's implementation - the euro zone's ESM rescue fund, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission - left Athens on Tuesday, leaving remaining issues to be resolved by technical staff and via teleconference.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Will Italy Leave the Euro? Follow the Money

30 OCT 17, 2016 1:31 AM EDT
By Mark Whitehouse

Bloomberg

Will Italy follow the U.K.'s example and leave the European Union? Far-fetched as it may seem, capital flows suggest that some people aren’t waiting to find out.

To keep the euro area's accounts in balance, Europe's central banks track flows of money among the members of the currency union. If, for example, a depositor moves 100 euros from Italy to Germany, the Bank of Italy records a liability to the Eurosystem and the Bundesbank records a credit. If a central bank starts building up liabilities rapidly, that tends to be a sign of capital flight.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Italy is the most likely country to leave the euro

Washington Post
By Matt O'Brien July 30 at 2:56 PM

What do you call a country that has grown 4.6 percent—in total—since it joined the euro 16 years ago? Well, probably the one most likely to leave the common currency. Or Italy, for short.

It's hard to say what went wrong with Italy, because nothing ever went right. It grew 4 percent its first year or so in the euro, but almost not at all in the 15 years since. Now, that's not to say that it's been flat the whole time. It hasn't. It got as much as 14 percent bigger as it was when it joined the euro, before the 2008 recession and 2011 double-dip erased most of that progress. But unlike, say, Greece, there was never much of a boom. There has only been a bust. The result, though, has been the same. As you can see below, Greece and Italy have both grown a meager 4.6 percent the past 16 years, although they took drastically different paths to get there.

Friday, November 22, 2013

France With Italy, Spain Seek Flexibility in Euro Budget Talks

By Ian Wishart & James G. Neuger - Nov 22, 2013 10:48 PM GMT+0200.
Bloomberg
France, Italy and Spain sought to maximize the flexibility of European Union budget-deficit rules to boost their economies as northern euro-area countries saw little need for stimulus.
The growth-versus-austerity debate was renewed at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels today, as euro-area governments attempted to coordinate budget policy for 2014 using powers that were introduced earlier this year as part of their response to a debt crisis now in its fifth year.
“No, no, no,” Italian Finance Minister Fabrizio Saccomanni told reporters when asked whether his government would modify its budget. “Reducing the debt load is also our goal, and we managed that both with fiscal policies by reducing the shortfalls and with additional measures that they have now fully understood.”

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Italy’s Borrowing Costs Rise at Bond Auction After Downgrade


By Chiara Vasarri - Mar 13, 2013 2:39 PM GMT+0200
Bloomberg
Italian borrowing costs rose in the first bond auction since a credit rating downgrade last week that highlighted the economic risks of the country’s current political stalemate.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

EU Opens Way for Easier Budgets After Austerity Backlash


By James G. Neuger & Svenja O’Donnell - Mar 5, 2013 1:01 AM GMT+0200
European finance ministers opened the way for looser budget policies after a backlash against austerity thrust Italy into political limbo and shattered months of relative stability in European markets.
Italy’s deadlocked election, France’s refusal to make deeper budget cuts and protests against the shrinking of the welfare state across southern Europe escalated the rebellion against the German-led prescription for fighting the debt crisis.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Italy behind rise in eurozone jobless to record


By By Pan Pylas on March 01, 2013
Bloomberg Businessweek
LONDON (AP) — Italy's voters gave their verdict on the austerity medicine they've been forced to take when they went to the polls earlier this week. By Friday, one of the reasons behind the protest was highlighted when the country's unemployment hit its highest level in at least two decades.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Italy Election Impasse Negative for Credit Rating, Moody’s Says


By Kevin Buckland - Feb 27, 2013 7:03 AM GMT+0200
Bloomberg
Italy’s inconclusive elections raise the chance for prolonged political uncertainty, putting the country’s sovereign credit rating at risk for a downgrade, Moody’s Investors Service said.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Italy Renews Market Concerns as Voters Reject Monti


By Andrew Frye - Feb 26, 2013 9:24 AM GMT+0200
Bloomberg
Italy’s inconclusive election triggered renewed market convulsions over Europe’s debt crisis as recession-scarred voters repudiated budget rigor and established former comedian Beppe Grillo as a political force.

Monday, February 4, 2013

European political worries halt risk asset rally


By Richard Hubbard
London | Mon Feb 4, 2013 11:23am GMT
(Reuters) - Stronger U.S. and Chinese economic data supported world equity markets on Monday, while the euro dipped and Spanish bond yields rose as growing political uncertainty in southern Europe worried investors.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

France Loses AAA Status as S&P Wields Ratings Ax


Bloomberg
The first gauge of the report’s impact will come in two days when France sells as much as 8.7 billion euros…
U.S. Treasuries rose, pushing yields to the lowest levels this year…
Perhaps this will now concentrate the minds of EU policy makers making them realize that no country is immune to being pulled down by the euro crisis…
Greece’s creditors yesterday suspended talks…
The French and Austrian downgrades risk sapping the potency of the region’s current rescue program…

Friday, January 13, 2012

Yields fall sharply at Spanish, Italian debt sales


a back-door bailout by the European Central Bank…
Italy also fared well, paying less than half what it did a month ago…
Spanish local media attributed the auction's success to tough cost-cutting measures…

Friday, December 30, 2011

Deepening Crisis Over Euro Pits Leader Against Leader


By MARCUS WALKER in Berlin, CHARLES FORELLE in Brussels and STACY MEICHTRY in Rome
The Wall Street Journal
Europe's leaders have an unwritten rule not to intervene in one another's domestic politics…
Italy, with nearly €2 trillion, or about $2.6 trillion, in national debt, was simply too big to save…
Europe's leaders were reluctantly realizing that living with a common currency meant surrendering more of their national independence than they had bargained for…
…The euro zone, which accounts for nearly 20% of global economic activity, is sliding into recession.…
Mr. Tremonti would later privately tell a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters in August…"The one from the ECB was worse,"…
… While the orchestra played Rossini and Mozart, a clique of Europe's most powerful leaders huddled in a side room…
… Her unspoken threat: Banks might get nothing if they spurned it…
…"The real question" for the referendum, Ms. Merkel told Mr. Papandreou there, "is 'Do you want to be in the euro, or not?'"…

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Italy yields seen easing, but hurdles loom


analysts doubted whether the unprecedented ECB move and domestic progress on reform would be enough…
Rome's short-term funding costs halved…
its longer-dated bonds are more reliant on foreign buyers…
…. the mix of indecisive action from EU policymakers, a deteriorating economic climate and tortuous progress on the reform front in Italy was fuelling an increasingly negative outlook on its short-term debt sustainability ….

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

German Push to Remodel Europe May Backfire


Bloomberg
By Rainer Buergin and Simone Meier - Dec 20, 2011 1:01 AM GMT+0200
The risk to Germany, …is that transforming the region’s struggling nations into blueprints of itself may work too well…
German labor costs rose at half the pace of Greece’s…
… Schroeder unveiled his packageIt took almost two years before the labor market began to show results,…
Northern Italy, especially the region around Milan, is as good as Baden-Wuerttemberg…

Monday, November 7, 2011

Merkel and Sarkozy Have Lost Credibility



The Wall Street Journal
Six weeks to save the euro," European leaders promised the world in September. That deadline passed at last week's Cannes G-20 summit with the goal looking further away then ever. Nothing of substance was agreed on the French Riviera to aid the cause of euro survival, but one giant decision was taken that could hasten its demise. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy's announcement that Greece is free to leave the euro has transformed the nature of the euro.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The Worst-Case Euro Scenario



Each day the currency remains on life-support in its current form, the consequences of its eventual death become graver.
The Wall Street Journal
By SAJID JAVID
On the Continent, August is usually reserved for long vacations in the sun. Instead, European leaders spent the month working on increasingly desperate attempts to save the euro in its current form. There's only one prospect more frightening than what would happen if they fail: what would happen if they succeed.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Eurobond Plan Would Need a Big Sweetener



The Wall Street Journal
The euro-zone crisis is solved. It took some doing, but the final pieces are in place.
First, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has promised to reform his nation's no-growth economy. Second, the European Central Bank has agreed to buy bonds of troubled countries, including Spain and Italy. Third, euro-zone leaders have agreed to authorize their bailout fund—a.k.a. the European Financial Stability Facility—to buy euro-zone government bonds in the secondary market. I would add a fourth but it takes irony too far: Euro-zone leaders have benefited from advisory phone calls from President Barack Obama, and Treasury SecretaryTimothy Geithner's warning that they are moving too slowly to confront their debt crisis.
Worries over and head for the beaches.