por admin » Lun Ene 23, 2012 10:13 pm
La EU llama a los tenedores de bonos a hacer mas concesiones mientras Grecia se descarrila.
EU Calls for More Bondholder Concessions as Greece Seen Going ‘Off Track’
By James G. Neuger and Josiane Kremer - Jan 23, 2012 8:02 PM ET
European finance ministers balked at putting up more public money for Greece, calling on bondholders to provide greater debt relief in order to point the way out of the two-year-old debt crisis.
Euro governments stood by an October offer of 130 billion euros ($170 billion) for a second Greek aid package. Officials want to fill a deeper-than-expected hole in the nation’s finances by saddling investors with a lower interest rate on exchanged bonds.
Brinkmanship over Greece clouded progress toward new fiscal rules and a beefed-up rescue fund, denting newfound confidence in the anti-crisis strategy and threatening to overshadow next week’s summit of European leaders.
“It’s obvious that the Greek program is off track,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters early today after chairing a meeting of European finance ministers in Brussels. He called on creditors to drop demands that new bonds carry coupons averaging 4 percent.
The stalemate is reminiscent of October’s bargaining over bond losses and risks disrupting the Jan. 30 summit. An accord with bondholders is key to a second financing package for the cash-strapped country, which faces a 14.5 billion-euro bond payment on March 20.
Efforts to shore up Greece, the trigger of the crisis, were flanked by headway on a German-inspired deficit-reduction treaty and indications that a cap on rescue lending might be boosted to 750 billion euros from 500 billion euros.
Intrusion
Greece’s struggle intruded on the Brussels meeting after bondholders made what Charles Dallara, managing director of the Washington-based Institute of International Finance, told Antenna TV constitutes a “maximum” debt-relief offer.
“The negotiations need to lead to a certain result and that result is not there,” Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager told reporters. The creditors’ offer would leave Greece’s debt “substantially above” 125 percent of gross domestic product in 2020, instead of the targeted 120 percent, he said.
Greek coupons should be below 3.5 percent for debt to be serviced until 2020 and below 4 percent over the full 30-year period, Juncker said.
Greece’s failure to wrap up the debt-reduction accord helped drive two-year yields to an all-time high of 206 percent yesterday. In contrast to earlier episodes in the crisis, investors were optimistic that Greece’s travails won’t spill over to the rest of Europe.
Italian Bonds
Italian bonds rose yesterday, pushing the extra yield over 10-year German bonds down to 418 basis points. The spread, a gauge of the perceived risk of lending to Italy’s government, is now the narrowest since Dec. 7.
Successful short-term debt sales in the past two weeks in Italy, Portugal, Spain, France and Belgium were smoothed by 489 billion euros disbursed by the European Central Bank in unlimited three-year loans to euro-region banks.
The central bank has drawn encouragement from pledges by political leaders to turn Europe into a low-debt economy, enforced by a fiscal treaty that finance ministers said is on track to be signed in March.
The treaty will create an EU-supervised automatic “correction mechanism” that would force governments to fix “significant” deviations from a target structural deficit of 0.5 percent of GDP, according to a Jan. 19 draft obtained by Bloomberg News.
ESM Timetable
Under German pressure, countries that don’t enact the fiscal pact will be denied aid from the permanent rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism. Finance ministers agreed to set up the ESM in July, a year ahead of schedule, after reaching a compromise with Finland over how it will award aid.
Finland, one of the four remaining euro-area borrowers rated AAA by Standard & Poor’s, forced through changes to provisions that could force it to underwrite loans against its will. Finance chiefs will sign the ESM treaty on Feb. 20, sending it to national parliaments for ratification.
Germany, Europe’s dominant economic power, gave the strongest signal yet that it would allow the temporary rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to lend its full remaining amount before it expires in mid-2013.
Combining the two funds would boost Europe’s unspent crisis-fighting capacity to 750 billion euros. In the past, Germany has backed plans to limit the combined lending at 500 billion euros.
Two Funds
Running the two funds in parallel “is being discussed,” Norbert Barthle, parliamentary budget spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an interview in Berlin. The issue may come up at next week’s summit, government spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
Meanwhile, the temporary fund will soon be ready to offer insurance to persuade investors to buy bonds, said Klaus Regling, the fund’s manager. It would only intervene if a country such as Italy or Spain requests the backup.
“We need a larger firewall,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in Berlin yesterday. “Without it, countries like Italy and Spain, that are fundamentally able to repay their debts, could potentially be forced into a solvency crisis by abnormal financing costs.”
Lagarde is seeking $500 billion for the IMF -- a number that looks “on the optimistic side,” she said yesterday. Euro- region central banks have pledged 150 billion euros. Debate over the IMF’s coffers will peak at a Group of 20 meeting in February.
ECB Board
A separate battle brewed who will take the seat on the ECB’s Executive Board that will open up when Spain’s Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo comes to the end of his eight-year term in May.
In a fight between the richer north and the debt-encumbered south, Luxembourg is seeking to wrest the seat away from Spain by nominating its central bank chief, Yves Mersch, the longest- serving monetary official in Europe.
Spain proposed Antonio Sainz de Vicuna, head of the ECB’s legal department, to hold onto a seat that has been in Spanish hands throughout the euro. A third contender, Mitja Gaspari, was put forward by Slovenia. The ministers put off a decision until the next meeting on Feb. 20.