Now Spain's in trouble

Spain is in trouble. Its banks are on the brink of a funding crisis, having been shut out of the debt markets, and have had to resort to borrowing €86bn from the European Central Bank.

Equity markets' rebound continued this week despite more ominous developments in Europe. Ratings agency Moody's downgraded Greek government debt to junk status. This merely confirmed what everyone has realised, but still caused another sell-off in Greek bonds as they fell out of various investment-grade bond indices and funds tracking the indices duly sold them.

More significantly, Spain was back in the spotlight. This week it had to pay almost 1% more to issue 18-month sovereign debt than last month. And its banks have been shut out of the debt markets: they had to resort to borrowing €86bn from the European Central Bank in May twice as much as just before Lehman's collapse two years ago.

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