发帖
雷达卡
Italian sell-off prompts emergency euro zone meet
The European Central Bank and the European Commission will hold an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the possibility that the debt crisis could spread to Italy from Greece, according to a media report Sunday.
The meeting comes in the wake of the sharp sell-off in Italian assets on Friday, Reuters reported, citing three unnamed official sources.
On Friday, Italian government bond yields jumped, as did the cost of insuring Italian sovereign debt against default, as worries grew over Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti’s possible exit.
The finance minister was tied to a corruption investigation involving a member of parliament and former aide. Conflicts between Tremonti and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government have also been rising.
Tremonti has been credited with keeping Italy, the euro zone’s third-largest economy, removed from the worst of the euro-zone debt crisis
Monday’s emergency meeting will be held before a previously scheduled meeting of the euro zone’s 17 finance ministers to discuss details of the second Greek bailout and bank stress-test results due Friday, Reuters said.
Politicians and banks are trying to work out a plan in which financial institutions would voluntarily roll over some of Greece’s maturing debt — a move that would spread at least some of the cost of another Greek bailout to private bondholders.
Also on Sunday, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said that more work needs to be done on regulating non-bank financial institutions, The Wall Street Journal reported on its website.
“The major revelation of the last four years was the fragility of the global economy,” Trichet told the Rencontres Economiques d’Aix-en-Provence conference, according to the report. “Strengthening resilience is absolutely essential given the fragility exhibited by the global economy.”
The European Union also needs stronger coordination of public spending, he added.
“We evidently need a strengthening of governance for the constellation of sovereign states that we have seen working together so effectively in terms of creating wealth,” he said, and that may someday mean the installation of a single euro-zone finance minister, according to the Journal report.
京公网安备 11010802022788号
