f4f ha scritto:
http://intermarketandmore.investireoggi.it/titoli-di-stato-btp-e-cct-in-crisi-1612.html
non male
Spain, not Italy, is the true Achilles heel of the euro zone.
If Spain continues to deteriorate - and this seems inevitable - political pressure on the ECB will be immense. The Spanish government has always been a much more important and effective player in EU institutions than Italy. Indeed a very senior EU official once told me that Spain was the only country that would ALWAYS get its way in the Commission because its diplomats and officials were absolutely ruthless in sabotaging all EU procedures and blackmailing other EU members in order to get their way when they perceived vital national interest to be at stake (eg EU fisheries policy, which has allowed the enormous Spanish shipping fleet to destroy North Atlantic and Mediterranean fish stocks despite strong environmental objectiosn from every other EU country)
The issue of vital national interest today is, of course, Spain's banking system, which is drowning in bad mortgage debt. The ECB, as we know is currently refinancing essentially the whole of the Spanish MBS market. But that will not be sufficient to revive the Spanish econom\y and reverse the collapse of Spanish housing. Spain will soon start to demand lower interest rates and probably start spending government money to INCREASE mortgage loans. Maybe at that point the market will start to realise that the Spanish government, despite its apparently strong fiscal position is a pretty poor credit - no better than, say, Brazil.
After all, Spain's fiscal position would look much weaker if half the country's mortagages were added to the public debt figures, as the should be, given that the local caja banks are effectively state-owned.
One way or another, Spanish credit is likely to prove vulnerable: either government debt will be downgraded or investors will stop treating the banking system as if it has full government support. Accordingly, it would make sense for EDS to have plenty of Spanish CDS exposure - both to the government AND to the banks.