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欧洲央行向市场紧急注资 防范金融风险
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The European Central Bank scrambled to head off a potential financial crisis yesterday by making an emergency injection of 94.8bn worth of funds into the region's money markets, after signs that liquidity was drying up.
The level of funds markedly exceeded the ECB's only previous major intervention on the day after 9/11 when it lent 69bn followed by 40bn over subsequent days. Even more striking was its one-day pledge to meet 100 per cent of all funding requests from financial institutions.
This liquidity injection was designed to ensure that money markets continued to function and did not succumb to a credit freeze. The US Federal Reserve followed suit although in far less dramatic fashion.
The ECB did not offer any detailed explanation for its move, which caught markets by surprise, but simply said it was now seeking to “assure orderly conditions in the euro money market”. However, it came as several financial institutions, such as BNP Paribas, admitted they had suffered significant losses as a result of investments linked to the credit markets.
Many of these are linked to problems in the US subprime mortgage sector.
It also came amid signs that liquidity has recently evaporated from parts of the European inter-bank market, pushing overnight borrowing rates sharply higher. Ed Marrinan, head of credit strategy at JPMorgan, said: “This appears to be a prudent, pre-emptive step to head off any possibility of liquidity problems.”
The ECB's intervention prompted a sharp rise in eurozone and US government bond prices – and a corresponding decline in yields – while the cost of insuring against a corporate default using derivatives rose sharply on both sides of the Atlantic.
In equity markets the FTSE, the leading UK stock index, lost 1.83 per cent, while Germany's DAX index fell 2 per cent, and France's CAC-40 fell 2.17 per cent after being down more than 3 per cent. In early US trading, the Dow fell 0.99 per cent, to 13,522.18. |
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