European economic daily news round-up
Yesterday's late breaking news that Standard & Poor's was downgrading the European Financial Stability Fund from AAA in line with its earlier downgrade of France hardly made a ripple in today's bond action.
The EFSF, once promoted as one of the main tools for preventing the spread of the debt crisis to the euro zone's bigger economies, held an auction of short term bonds today and sold 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) worth of them.
Spain also sold short term debt this morning and saw interest rates on them drop from 4.05 percent to 2.049 percent. That is a dramatic fall.
Clearly the S&P downgrades have not meant the end of the world when it comes to the euro zone.
The euro was up against the dollar and stock markets – FTSE, CAC-40 and DAX – were all up, as well.
Analysts credited the news that China's growth figures show its economy is contracting more slowly than expected: Soft landing = rising stock prices.
It also helps that figures released today show inflation is falling in the UK – it's down to 4.2 percent – and in the euro zone – down to 2.7 percent.
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