But the size of the potential bailout for Italy, which needs to repay 326 billion euros in maturing debt only in the next 12 months, is too big to handle for the EFSF.
The EFSF will also then be able to buy bonds on the primary and secondary markets, using various insurance schemes that would boost four to five-fold its currently free funds of around 250 billion euros.
The ECB aggressively bought Italian bonds on the market on Wednesday focusing on 2-year and 10-year maturities to halt the rise of Italian borrowing costs, traders said.
But the intervention only managed to bring the 10-year yield down to 7.25 percent from 7.46 percent.
A deal for a coalition government in Greece to be headed by house leader Filipos Petsalnikos has collapsed with a new meeting scheduled Thursday morning. Dow Jones reports a senior PASOK official as saying the Greek socialist party is "in chaos."
Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes that the European problem boils down to that Italy is simply too big to fail and too big to save after no one was prepared for the nation to leapfrog Portugal and Ireland to become the next debt crisis. Even worse, it leads to the troubling question of what to do about Greece if the dominoes are really starting to fall: "The problem is that if Italy can’t be saved, there’s no real point in saving Greece. Greece knows it and France and Germany know it."
狗仔卡
发表于 2011-11-9 01:26 PM
发表于 2011-11-9 01:35 PM
