Italian long term bond sales - Underwhelming

-
FT.com has the story
The Treasury in Rome sold €2.5bn of bonds due in 2014 at a yield of 5.62 per cent on Thursday, down from 7.89 per cent at the previous sale on November 29, and priced €2.5bn of 2022 bonds to yield 6.98 per cent, compared with 7.56 per cent on November 29. Italy also sold €2bn worth of bonds due in 2021 and a floating-rate security due in 2018.
However, the auction of both the 2014 and 2021 maturity notes fell short of the Treasury’s target, clouding what would otherwise have been a relatively successful follow-up to the six-month bill auction.
Let met get this straight
   - They sold 10 yr bonds at 6.98% instead of 7.56%.  Yay!  Victory!  Eurocrisis resolved!  Thats sarcasm, in case you didnt figure it out
   - They didnt sell as many as they were expecting.  Thats not good by any stretch of the imagination

The second point is particularly bad, since the ECB LTRO stuff basically had the same maturity, and sold like hotcakes.

And the first point is *horrific*, since all Italy has to do is grow at 5% to maintain their primary surplus.  And the trend on that is not positive at all (hint, its at ~1%, and falling)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
Read more

Visualizing Prime Numbers

-
Image
From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
Read more