Italian officials have held talks with their Chinese counterparts about potential investments in the euro region’s third-largest economy, an Italian government official said.
The purchase of Italian bonds by China was not the focus of the talks, which took place in the past few weeks, the official said on condition of anonymity, without specifying which assets may be involved. A spokesman for Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti declined to comment. News of the Chinese interest comes on the eve of a 7 billion-euro ($9.6 billion) bond sale.
Signs of contagion from the region’s sovereign debt crisis threatened to engulf Italy and pushed the country’s bond-yields to a euro-era record last month. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government rushed through a 54 billion-euro austerity package to convince the European Central Bank to buy its debt. More than 60 billion euros of European bond purchases in the past five weeks has done little to shore up Italian debt.
The yield on the country’s 10-year bond rose 16 basis points to a five-week high 5.57 percent today, almost 4 percentage points more than the yield on comparable German debt.
A report in the Financial Times today that China would buy “significant” amounts of Italian government bonds helped U.S. stocks reverse losses in the last 90 minutes, as concern about Europe’s debt crisis eased. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 0.7 percent to 1,162.27 at the 4 p.m. close in New York.
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