Tag: Portugal

* Italy bond selloff not just about politics - Italy debt official * Contagion from Italy limited - Portugal debt chief * ECB tapering no problem - issuers (Updates throughout) By Abhinav Ramnarayan and Dhara Ranasinghe LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - Recent sharp volatility in short-dated Italian government bonds was partly due to technical factors in addition to political concerns, a senior official at the Italian government debt agency said on Tuesday. Italian bond markets in May experienced some of their biggest swings in several years as an anti-establishment coalition took shape in Rome. But some technical factors such as the reduced capacity of primary dealers to trade government bonds also contributed to market volatility, Davide Iacovoni, director general, Public Debt Directorate at Italy’s Department of Treasury said at a conference in London. “We have the feeling that the magnitude of the swings is not only attributable to political events but to technical changes in the market as well,” he said a Euromoney conference. He also said that a lack of liquidity in the BTP bond futures market impacted trading in cash bonds. Also speaking at the conference, the Portuguese debt management agency’s chairwoman and chief executive Cristina Casalinho said the contagion from events such as the recent Italy selloff seems to have subsided compared with the height of the euro zone debt crisis. They said that ECB tapering had been well anticipated by markets and that reinvestments from maturing bonds would continue to support bonds well after monthly asset purchases end. The bank also signaled that any interest rate hike remains some way off. Portugal’s Casalinho meanwhile added that effective ECB communication also helped from an issuer’s perspective. “What’s really relevant is good communication and so far the ECB has a good track record on that front,” she told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.

Is hosting the World Cup a “propaganda victory” for Vladimir Putin? Happily for our purposes – I am using only World Cups and European Championships, because I have more polling information and more democracies to choose from – the most recent two contests occurred in democracies and relatively close to an election. France hosted the 2016 European Championship, reaching the final before losing to Portugal, a successful tournament by anyone’s standards. The winners, Portugal, had had an election the year before. The most recent World Cup was hosted in Brazil, the summer before their presidential election. Maddeningly, winners Germany had just had an election a year before, but Angela Merkel does appear to have had a small bounce in the polls in the immediate aftermath, but it is hard to be sure: her ruling CDU/CSU went from polling around 40 per cent to around 44 percent, so barely outside the margin of error. Frustratingly, Poland had had elections a year prior, so our information is less useful, but Ukraine, like Brazil, had an election the following autumn, where the incumbent government was re-elected. Victory in the Euros actually coincided with a fall in the polls for Spain’s ruling People’s Party. But the hosting nations had no political boost and the governing parties in Austria both slumped to their worst-ever performances in the snap elections that followed the autumn after the contest. So the recent evidence, such as it is, is clear: there is no political dividend for Vladimir Putin to be had in Russia hosting the World Cup.