Tag Archives: irish default

Time for England to complete the conquest of Ireland

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The UK conquest of Ireland began in 1169.

It’s time to finish the job.

All they have to do is offer the following:

Ireland converts all its public debt to sterling.

The UK Treasury takes over the responsibility for all of Ireland’s existing public debt.

(Ireland gets a clean start with no Irish govt. debt and not interest payments)

Ireland taxes and spends in sterling only and has a balanced budget requirement.

Ireland can borrow only for capital expenditures.

The UK Treasury guarantees all existing insured euro bank deposits in Irish banks.

Only sterling deposits are insured for new deposits.

Ireland runs a mirror tax code to the UK and keeps all of its tax revenues.

The UK agrees to fund Ireland’s with a pro rata/per capita share of any UK deficit spending.

St. Patrick’s Day is declared a UK national holiday and everyone over 21 gets a beer voucher.

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Euro Central Banks Step Up Bond Buying, Traders Say

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Euro Central Banks Step Up Bond Buying, Traders Say

By Paul Dobson

June 29 (Bloomberg) — Euro-region central banks stepped up purchases of Greek, Portuguese and Irish government securities today, traders said, deepening efforts to support the region’s bond market in the wake of the sovereign-debt crisis.

The purchases focused on maturities of five years and below, with some buying interest also shown for longer-maturity Greek bonds, said the traders, who declined to be identified because the transactions are confidential. The extra yield, or spread, investors demand to hold the nations’ securities instead of benchmark German debt narrowed.

The European Central Bank took the unprecedented decision to start buying government bonds last month to help the European Union contain the Greek debt crisis. The ECB said yesterday it bought 4 billion euros ($5 billion) of bonds last week, taking the total purchases as of June 25 to 55 billion euros. Greek debt spreads had been widening, approaching their levels before the EU rescue was announced in early May, amid speculation funds that track bond indexes were selling the debt.

Central banks “are more active than they have been of late,” said Huw Worthington, a fixed-income strategist at Barclays Capital in London. “There has been a lot of volatility in a lot of the spreads, and some concerns of selling ahead of the month end.”

Greek two-year notes rose, sending the yield down 41 basis points to 10.19 percent as of 3:43 p.m. in London. The yield spread with German two-year notes fell 39 basis points to 1001 basis points. The yield on 10-year Greek bonds fell 41 basis points to 10.57 percent.

Greek securities will leave indexes managed by Citigroup Inc., Barclays Plc and the Markit iBoxx index at the end of this month after they were downgraded to junk by Moody’s Investors Service, potentially triggering sales by managers in so-called passive funds.

The Irish two-year bond yield fell 11 basis points to 2.88 percent and equivalent-maturity Portuguese yields dropped nine basis points to 3.61 percent.

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