You may have believed all that Brussels bollocks about the ECB’s eurozone bond buying programme being at an end. Well…it isn’t. After Portugal’s 10- year bonds fell to less than half their face value, I can reveal that SuperMario dived in to stop things turning into a rout. And if necessary, the Italian Stallion will do so again.
Meanwhile, the banks described constantly by Brussels as ultra-safe stole a record 530 billion euros from SuperMario’s ECB, so great was their desire to lend to eurobusiness. The only problem being that, thus far, there’s zero evidence of so much as one centime being lent to business. Whatever can they be using this money for?
Even the ever-inventive S&P can’t answer that one, for fear of upsetting the whole apple-cart. But it has come up with an intriguing new product designed to measure the risk to those economies on the fringes of – or just outside – the eurozone. And guess what? The Slog’s much-predicted demise of Turkey seems to be very much on the cards. The Emerging Europe Sensitivity Index (EESI) gives Erdogan’s mad economy a score of 2.94 – easily the highest around – as a result of the Great Leader’s insane Sharia credit-boom thinking. Fascinatingly, the country lying second most vulnerable to eurozone hubris is luckless Hungary….currently being bullied by that very same eurozone into doing its neocon bidding.
But despite all this evidence of impending disaster on several fronts, Goldman Sachs Schutzstaffel parachutist Mario Monti of Italy says the worst is now over for the EU. Two weeks ago, Signor Monti was suggesting that one day, the bond spreads between Germany and Italy would narrow. Now he’s moving things forward (based on zero evidence) and asserting that “I don’t think it is likely spreads will widen again”. That’s a different thing entirely, but Mario is smart enough to understand that in the age of 24/7 news, this will have a confidence-boosting effect, without the downside of somebody saying, “Are you nuts or what?” But he didn’t reckon with The Slog, ha-haar.
There’s no holding Mario Monti now. Asked about Berlin’s ‘issues with’ aka ‘refusal to consider’ increasing the ezone firewall fund, Monti told reporters today, “They didn’t say they don’t want to discuss this in March; they prefer not to discuss this on the 1st of March. March has, luckily enough, 31 days.” Beware the Ides of March.
You really couldn’t make some of this stuff up. Tomorrow in the late afternoon, ISDA is very likely to call the Greek debt restructure a full-on default, and thus help to trigger a major-league CDS insurance Tsunami with which Wall Street must deal. Meanwhile, we still don’t know if the IIF is going to play ball, or indeed what any of the Hedgies think on the question of Greek debt holdout.
But apart from that, the eurocrisis is abating, and the worst is over. Excellent.