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IRELAND HAS RAISED €2.5 billion in a short-notice bond auction, after strong investor demand prompted the body in charge of Ireland’s national debt to sell a greater volume of bonds than had been planned.
The National Treasury Management Agency had only yesterday announced its plans to reopen a bond issued last year, maturing in 2017, but had not set a date for when the auction would take place.
It had planned to issue a further €2 billion of those bonds, in an attempt to build up a significant cash buffer ahead of Ireland’s planned exit from the EU-IMF bailout programme later this year.
However, bidding was opened this morning – with demand for over €7 billion in bonds prompting the NTMA to issue more than it had originally expected.
The bonds were sold with a yield – or interest rate – of 3.55 per cent.
Ireland is expected to raise about €10 billion in cash reserves before leaving the EU-IMF programme, in order to overcome any momentary difficulties in accessing money from the open market.
Today’s auction marks the first time since before the bailout that the NTMA has issued a ‘benchmark’ bond since before Ireland entered its €67.5 billion .
Owen Callan of Danske Bank Markets said demand for today’s bond had been “high from the start, with a wide range of international investors involved”.
“This, coupled with the fact that the overall bids totalled around EU7bn, is very positive and suggests that Ireland is gradually regaining creditworthiness in the eyes of international investors,” he said.
He added that the new bond meant that Ireland was now funded to overcome a “funding cliff” in January 2014, when a series of other government bonds and bills fall due.
“Overall it’s a great start to the year for the NTMA,” he said.
The cost of borrowing on a 9-year basis – the main benchmark bond currently in issue – fell to 4.4 per cent after the auction, its lowest since December 2009.
Can’t they just sell some bitcoins to cover the losses
No because they claim all BTC have been stolen, but they got hacked and database leak says otherwise
It’s all fugazi
My advice if you have a few bob spare is invest one weekends drink money in lite coins. Created by Google engineers its an alternative to bit coin and a couple of years behind it. When you consider a bit coin was what a few euro and jumped up to 700 or so at one point. A lite coin is about 11 euro a coin. If anything you cash out in months with what you invest I do see it climbing.
You could mine then but jesus its painful and even if you have best pc its not worth it
I got 2,200 xrp free – ripple. Waiting to see what happens. Sat on my free mined bitcoins for a couple of years thinking they would never be worth anything, how wrong I was :)
Thanks. Going to look into that.
Do check it out :) mining a bit coin your talking years to wsrn one coin in which case you fried a few gpu’s and a esb bill of small country. They are expensive to but also hundred for one.
That’s why I think lite coins could work. Would you really miss €100 next year if it falls apart but could get nice little return. There is few sites where you can see how much bit and lite coins ate trafing against $£€
@eye c u depends on the hashing power you have. If you have a knc 2 terrahash miner you will mine a couple of bitcoins a year at current difficulty. Scrypt based coins like litecoin/dogecoin are cheaper for the average person to get involved in. BTW you never told us how you got those scars?
From dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight. I told you that last week.
The sooner this renegade stops dragging out its 15 minutes the better it’ll be for Bitcoin as a whole!
You just have to love the word “allegedly”!
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