Spanish Officials Try To Stem Fears as Funding Costs Surge!

• The sovereign debt crisis will build over time into an inevitable global collapse. After Ireland, it looks like the snakes will bash Portugal. Thereafter, the rest of the PIIGS, then the Big 3 ie : Germany, France and England. Spain is a large economy. Should Spain default, the falling dominoes will not be controllable. This is all an engineered collapse paving the way for a One World Currency, Global Supra-National Central Bank and World Government. The solution by the Illuminist IMF/ECB are red herrings. They will result in guaranteed financial, economic and monetary collapse. This is a scam to enslave the sheeple. They will foot the bill to their own financial rape!
    
  Spanish Officials Try To Stem Fears as Funding Costs Surge
  MADRID—Spanish officials are stressing their deficit-cutting efforts are on track and promised to push through tough economic reforms in a renewed effort to keep concerns about Ireland from spilling into the largest of the troubled euro zone economies.
   
  In the latest sign of investors worries, Spanish financing costs shot up at a debt auction on Tuesday, and the country’s risk premium – as measured by the spread on Spain’s 10-year bond over the German equivalent – hit its highest level since the creation of the euro in 1999, underscoring that progress to reduce budget deficits isn’t coming quickly enough to stem the damage.
   
  Bank of Spain Governor Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, urged lawmakers, who are debating Spain’s 2011 budget, not to relax those efforts. “The international financial and economic community and our European partners are going to be very demanding,” he said. A budget vote is expected by the end of the year.
    
  Spooked by Greece’s financial meltdown, investors first started to become concerned about the possibility of sovereign debt defaults in other fiscally frail euro zone countries in May. In recent days, tensions have again flared up as Ireland’s public finances buckled under cost of shoring up its ailing banks.
   
  Spain wasn’t originally hard hit by the latest bout of anxiety as measures such as a 5% cut in public-sector salaries and a two percentage point rise in value-added tax show signs of paying off. According to new data Tuesday, the Spain’s central government deficit fell by almost half in the first 10 months of the year to €31.26 billion (42.78 billion), or 2.96% of gross domestic product. The government has pledged to lower its overall budget deficit—including regional governments and other layers of administration—to 9.3% of GDP this year from 11.1% last year.
   
  Still, even with the recent budgetary improvements, investors began to demand higher premiums to fund Spain’s debt sales Tuesday in the wake of the Irish bailout. At a sale of €3.256 billion of three- and six-month treasury bills, the Treasury’s paid an average yield of 1.743% on the three-month T-bills, up 83% from 0.951% a month ago, and it paid an average yield of 2.111% on the six-month T-bills, up 64% from 1.285% previously. The country is still some way from meeting its funding needs for 2010 and has further debt sales scheduled.
   
  The cost to insure the country’s sovereign debt also reached new highs Tuesday, while Spain’s stock market was down about 3.1%, capping a second day of losses since the news of Ireland broke out. “We must highlight that we’re abiding by our commitments,” Carlos Ocaña, deputy finance minister for the budget, told lawmakers in parliament. “Due to the extraordinary measures taken, our situation is better than those of other countries, and better than it was in May,” he added.

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