Spread bet the European debt crisis

As worries about Europe's debt burden increase, speculators are targeting eurozone countries. Tim Bennett looks at some of the options available to spread betters.

Where will it end? So far, Greece and Ireland have in effect thrown in the towel and admitted they can't cope with their huge national debt burdens alone.

Now speculators are focusing on eurozone countries such as Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Evidence that the markets don't believe they can survive without some form of bail-out comes from debt spreads as fears mount, the gap between the yield investors demand for holding safe German bonds and much less safe 'periphery' nation bonds widens. Just today, for example, that gap for Spanish and Italian government bonds hit record highs (since the euro was introduced).

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.