Weekly Business News Summary -- week ending June 23, 2012
The Eurozone crisis again dominated business and economics news this week. A new Greek government took office and it is seeking to revise the second bailout that was agreed with the EU-ECB-IMF troika. The Group of Twenty summit of leaders of advanced and emerging economies put pressure on Angela Merkel, German chancellor, to take bold measures to tackle the ongoing debt crisis. The Financial Times reported that peripheral bank shares are at 1985 levels, according to the Datastream PIIGS Banks index. US shares’ one-year returns are outperforming the eurozone by the most since 1991. The Bank of Spain reported on stress tests which found that Spanish banks need fresh capital of €62bn and on Thursday an auction of Spanish debt had an average yield on bonds maturing in 2017 at 6.072%, compared with 4.96% in the previous auction last month. However, the 10-year Spanish bond yield dropped below 6.4% Friday, falling from a eurozone-era peak above 7.3% set Monday. In Ireland, the ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) forecast that GDP (gross domestic product) and GNP (gross national product -- mainly excluding the profits of the dominant multinational sector) will increase by 2.2% and 0.5% respectively in 2013.
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