Sometimes “something you hadn’t been following… is highlighted to you and you stagger back in shock”, says Albert Edwards of Societe Generale. The yield on the five-year Greek government bond has slipped beneath its US counterpart. For a country that has borrowed too much since its foundation to be considered a better credit risk than Uncle Sam seems absurd. But it is a snapshot of how impressed investors are with Greece’s recovery from the debt crisis, says Matthew A Winkler on Bloomberg.
Growth is outpacing the eurozone average and the budget deficit, 15% in 2009, has become a surplus. Investors have piled back into Greek bonds, sending yields to near-record lows. The ten-year yield reached 49% in 2012.