The European Central Bank intervened dramatically in bond markets on Monday, backing up a verbal pledge to support Spain and Italy with action in an attempt to avert a financial meltdown in the eurozone. Significant ECB bond-buying - the only practical result of a weekend of frantic G7 and G20 crisis diplomacy - forced down Italian and Spanish borrowing costs in an initial reaction.
But stock markets fell across the globe as investors rattled by a historic downgrade of the United States' credit rating piled out of shares and into safe haven assets such as gold and German bonds. Shares on Wall Street shed three percent in early trade. Traders estimated the ECB bought about 2 billion euros in Italian and Spanish debt after it agreed on Sunday to broaden its controversial bond-buying programme for the first time to include the bloc's third- and fourth-biggest economies. "The intervention by the European Central Bank this morning seems to have been working," Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan told RTE public radio.
"Last week the risk was that as bond rates in Italy went towards 7 percent, they'd be driven into some kind of bailout programme. They have fallen by almost one percent this morning so they are well out of the bailout territory now." The central bank action aimed to change the dynamics on bond markets that had been pushing Italian and Spanish borrowing costs up towards unsustainable levels since mid-July.
"Speculators will now have to think twice about selling or shorting Italian and Spanish bonds, knowing the ECB will be acting against them," said Shane Oliver, head of investment strategy at AMP Capital Investors, one of Australia's biggest fund managers. But experts warned the ECB would have to make large-scale purchases for a significant period to have a sustained impact, uncharted territory for the bank and a move which was opposed by influential members of its Governing Council last week.
"The ECB will have to buy 320 billion euros of Italian and Spanish government bonds simply to maintain the same proportion of purchases made relative to the outstanding debt of Greece, Ireland and Portugal made through the 75 billion euro Securities Market Programme acquisitions to date," said Vincenzo Albano, Reuters Insider Fixed Income analyst.
Spreads of Italian and Spanish bonds over German debt narrowed sharply and the cost of insuring peripheral European debt against default fell. But French sovereign credit default swaps hit a record high of 160 basis points as the US rating downgrade raised questions about how long other AAA countries, such as France, could hold onto their top-notch ratings.
Investors also turned their attention to what the Federal Reserve might say at its policy meeting on Tuesday, fuelling speculation it might soon have to consider a third round of quantitative easing to resuscitate the world's richest economy. After a rare Sunday night conference call, the ECB welcomed announcements by Italy and Spain of new deficit cutting measures and economic reforms as well as a Franco-German pledge that the eurozone's rescue fund will take responsibility for bond-buying once it is operational, probably in October.
The central bank had been reluctant to step up its buying of distressed debt, fearing it would be seen as a blank cheque to spendthrift governments. Since the programme began in May last year it has bought just 76 billion euros of bonds, while Italy and Spain alone issue around 600 billion a year.
Berlin denied that Germany and France had made any stronger promises about the eurozone rescue fund's (EFSF) commitment to purchase the bonds of weak member states in the secondary market, after the ECB singled out that pledge. Europe's central bankers face a difficult balancing act. "The trick is (for the ECB) to buy enough to show such a commitment to a certain yield level that investors feel comfortable in buying alongside the ECB," said Gary Jenkins, head of fixed income at Evolution Securities.
A bailout of Italy would overwhelm the EFSF's existing resources. Germany has so far opposed expanding it but French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said: "The allotment is 440 billion and we've already said if we need to go further we will go further." However, Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, whose country has become one of the most sceptical of further eurozone bailouts, told Reuters that Berlin and Paris had made no new commitment on the EFSF and could anyway not commit other members of the currency area. The Group of Seven major industrial nations - the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - said they would take joint action if needed in foreign exchange markets because "disorderly movements ... have adverse effects for economic and financial stability." Pressure is now growing on the Fed to try further easing - dubbed QE3 by the market - though few expect anything dramatic as early as Tuesday's policy meeting.