The implicit interest rate on 10-year loans to Italy (the yield on 10-year bonds) rose again above the 7% level which is regarded as punitively unaffordable.
Even so, as taxpayers we should probably be grateful that gilt yields - the implicit interest rate paid by the government - are so low at the moment.
As ever, a drop in the yield on German bonds, the fall in the implicit interest rate it would have to pay, is not a sign that investors are any more hopeful that a solution to the eurozone's stresses are anywhere in sight.
The implicit interest rate that investors charge for lending to Spain for ten years - what's known as the yield on the benchmark ten-year bonds - has in the past 24 hours exceeded what they demand of Italy, and is now more or less the same.
And the cost to the supplier of immediate cash payment by the bank, in respect of the implicit interest rate or discount on the bill, ought to be tiny - because the bank is in effect lending to the safe big company, which ultimately honours the bill, not to the riskier supplier.
The point is that Italy's bond yield - the implicit interest rate it pays - is unlikely to fall decisively below the catastrophically unaffordable 7% unless and until the eurozone demonstrates that there is a bailout facility (of some sort) that has sufficient resources to lend to Italy if investors refuse to do so.
The liquidity and trading in those older issues is so tiny that it doesn't give much guidance as to the potential cost for the government of borrowing substantial sums at what are known as ultra long maturities - but for what it's worth the 1932 war loan pays an implicit interest rate of 3.9% at its current price.
The implicit GDP price deflator was up at a 1.4 percent rate in the third quarter, 0.1 percent less than in the advance estimate and above the 0.7 percent increase in the second quarter.
FORBES: The Revised Third Quarter GDP--Better, But Not By Much
应用推荐