European finance chiefs begin the final stage of hammering out a Greek rescue to prevent the euro area’s first sovereign default after the country was slapped with the world’s lowest credit rating by Standard & Poor’s.
Yields on 10-year Greek bonds climbed to a euro-era record of 17.12 percent today before an emergency session of finance ministers in Brussels. They’re seeking to narrow differences on how investors share the cost of easing Europe’s biggest debt burden and to wrap up a new financing plan at a leaders’ summit on June 23-24, a year after Greece received a first bailout.
“The market is placing much too high a probability on this possibility that Greece will default imminently,” Peter Westaway, chief European economist at Nomura International Plc, said today on Bloomberg Television’s “First Look.” “Policy makers just aren’t going to let Greece default. It’s completely fanciful to think this is going to happen.”
S&P said yesterday the nation is “increasingly likely” to face a debt restructuring, reflecting political pressure on investors not to dump Greek holdings. The cost to insure Greek debt, the most expensive in the world, indicates a chance of about three in four that Greece will default in the next five years. The government today sold 1.6 billion euros ($2.3 billion) of 26-week treasury bills at a yield of 4.96 percent.
“Greece will default; it’s a question of when, rather than if,” said Vincent Truglia, managing director at New York-based Granite Springs Asset Management LLP and a former head of the sovereign risk unit at Moody’s. “It’s a basic solvency issue rather than a liquidity issue. Only a debt writedown will do.”
Bloomberg
