Spanish Bailout: Fail in Record Time
June 11, 2012
Early news from Europe this morning: the relief from the Spanish weekend Spanish bank bailout has already begun to fade. Spanish bond yields are rising despite the bailout and Italian bond yields are also rising. (Rising bond yields mean that investors demand higher interest rates to hold the debt of a given country.) In the past, European quick fixes have bought weeks and months of calm; it’s beginning to look as if the Spanish bailout bought hours.
Europe did its usual thing last weekend, kicking the can down the road. A $125 billion plus bailout of the Spanish banking system would, the eurocrats expected, buy some time. They didn’t have any particular plans about how to use that time to fix the underlying problems of the troubled eurozone, but anything is better than a financial panic and a catastrophic meltdown.
Unfortunately this time the can doesn’t seem to have gone very far down the road. Investors seem to be losing faith in Europe’s ‘hope-something-turns-up’ strategy for solving the biggest financial disaster since World War Two. If true, that is very bad news for us all.