In Brief
Strong demand for Greek 5-yr bond, yield 3.79 pct Greece’s reopening of a 3.9 percent five-year government bond met with strong demand on Tuesday with the auction, the only eurozone offering this week, covered almost six times. The country’s Public Debt Management Agency sold a total of 1.2 billion euros of the bond, topping off the original amount of 1 billion with 200 million in non-competitive bids. The auction produced a weighted average yield of 3.79 percent, down from 3.9 percent in a previous May 17 syndicated tender. Greece plans to tap the capital market again in September with an auction of a 10-year government paper, an official at the PDMA said. «The auction attracted strong interest from primary dealers as there is only one more remaining in September,» said a bond dealer at a major Greek bank. (Reuters) Turk consumer confidence falls to all-time low in July ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s consumer confidence index slid in July to its lowest level since the survey was launched, data showed this week, continuing a decline which started after an inflation shock-and-sharp lira sell-off. The index, which was launched in December 2003 and measures consumer behavior and expectations, fell 3.87 percent in July to 88.6 points, central bank and Turkish Statistics Institute data showed. The index had been on a broadly rising trend until April this year, after which double-digit inflation spooked foreign investors and knocked as much as 25 percent off the value of the lira currency in May and June. The central bank has cranked up borrowing rates 425 basis points, aiming to tame inflation. Higher rates are also crimping demand as credit becomes harder to pay off. The confidence index had fallen to 92.2 points in June and in May fell to 100.1 points, just above the 100-point watershed separating optimism from pessimism. TAV sale scrapped Turkey’s TAV Investment Holding said yesterday that it would not sell a stake in its airport operator TAV to Deutsche Bank as planned. TAV said in May that it would sell a stake to Deutsche Bank for $150 million. «Our talks with Deutsche could not bring about an agreement,» a TAV official told Reuters but did not give reasons for the breakdown in talks. The company is still in meeting with Australia’s Babcock and Brown and Onyx, a private investment fund, over the purchase of shares, said the official. Earlier this year, TAV completed the sale of $73 million worth of its shares to the Islamic Development Bank fund. In an announcement on Tuesday, Kuwait’s Global Investment House said its newly created branch Global Opportunistic Fund II had bought $75 million worth of the airport operator’s shares. (Reuters)
