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28 September 2011
Italy and Spain pay more to borrow
Euronews.net - Italy was able to sell 14.5 billion euros worth of short-term government bonds in its latest debt auction on Tuesday.
But Rome again had to pay higher rates of interest to raise most of that money.
It was Italy’s first bond auction since the country’s credit rating was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s last week.
Spain also paid higher borrowing rates as it sold 3.2 billion euros of new short-term debt.
The sales showed that Italy and Spain can finance their debt but at a relatively high cost, despite the European Central Bank buying the country’s government debt on the secondary markets.
Italy has debt of 1.9 trillion euros — more than Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined — and the second highest debts as a percentage of national income in the whole euro zone after Greece.
