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Chinese relation crashed the Greek spreads

28 January 2010 / 09:01:20  GRReporter
3329 reads

An announcement of the Financial Times that the Greek government has assigned to the investment bank Goldman Sachs to sell government bonds to China for the amount of 25 billion euro crashed the Athens stock exchange in only few hours and launched to a new peak the Greek spreads. The financial analyzers qualified what happened as a “black Wednesday” for the Athens stock exchange, while the country got the most unexpected support from George Soros, who stated from the tribune of the World economic forum in Davos, that it will do everything in its power to stay in the euro zone.

 Referring to a source of high standing from the American Goldman Sachs the powerful economic daily paper Financial Times claims that the Greek government is trying to sell China government bonds for the amount of 25 billion euro. A representative of the investment bank visited Athens twice in November and once again in January in order to discuss the details on the deal with the Greek government. According to the same publication Goldman Sachs has started to mediate for the purchase of a crucial share of the National Bank of Greece by the Bank of China or China Investment Corporation and for this purpose it negotiates with the Chinese agency for international transactions. This information was confirmed by the Chinese electronic issue http://business.sohu.com.

The announcement was explicitly rejected by the Greek financial ministry which, however admitted that in February minister Georgios Papakonstantinou will really visit China and take part in a promotional campaign for the Greek government bonds. The administration of the National Bank of Greece as well as the Chinese agency for foreign transactions also denied the information, however the Goldman Sachs bank remained silent regarding the case. The Greek agency for the management of the foreign debt confirmed the plans of the government or the Asian roadshow for promoting the debt bonds.

As the condition of the Athens stock exchange was already unstable anyways, all of this was enough for it to collapse again and its index to go under 2000 points and to finish the day with 1.972,93 points. The decrease for a day was by 3,89 percent and the total volume of the transactions made was 210,2 million euro. The once who suffered the most losses again were the Greek banks, whose shares decreased in price with 5,89 percent. After them in the list of the affected were the producers of raw materials whose share price dropped by 5,69 percent. By 4,86% dropped the shares of the big businesses, by 2,03% decreased the prices of shares of medium businesses and by 1,83% the price of the small business.

While the Athens stock exchange was going down, the Greek spreads, or in other words the difference in the prices of the Greek government bonds in relation to the German once, rose by nearly 60 points and in the middle of the trading day they reached a historical record in their value of 370 points in order to calm down and by the end of the day to reach 354 points.
The only positive news for Greece today came from Davos, where the speculative billionaire George Soros unexpectedly turned out to be positive that the country in debt has to stay in the euro zone. Facing the World economic forum Soros claimed that he does not take part in the trade of the Greek government bonds, however he was seriously considering doing that in the future. According to him, Greece will do everything in its powers to keep on being part of the common European currency because this will be the only way to receive soft terms of foreign crediting and take advantage of the privileges of repos, special privileged loans at great security for the investor and the borrower granted by the European central bank.

Tags: governemt bonds china athens stock exchange spread George Soros
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