Nicos Anastasiades is a brave man who believes that fortune favors the bold. Or at least he hopes so. Thus the head of state of Cyprus, the small island in the Mediterranean - which was saved a year ago by a maxi loan of 10 billion euros provided by the EU and the IMF - said that Nicos could return to international markets by the end of this month, a year earlier than creditors had originally expected.
Anastasiades revealed his intention during a dinner held in Cyprus this week at the Shipowners' Chamber of Commerce. The Cypriot president also wanted to underline that this ambitious result was made possible thanks to the strict compliance by the government of the conditions (and roadmap) set by the bailout that the island received in March last year from other countries of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund led by Christine Lagarde.
Who will be the actors of this return to the markets? The finance ministry said it has assigned Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs International, HSBC, UBS Investment Bank and VTB Capital to look for interested investors in international markets. In April, Cyprus cautiously sounded market sentiment by placing 100 million euros in six-year bonds issued through a private placement, with an interest rate of 6,5 percent. A good start to be able to attempt, one year after the bailout, a return to the markets in a big way in the footsteps of Antonis Samaras' Greece, which recently placed three billion euros in five years with a rate of less than 5 percent.
Without forgetting that even Cyprus (although it is putting its accounts in order and launching structural reforms in record time) is benefiting from an increasingly expansive monetary policy of the ECB to the point that some operators seem to be tempted to make a "carry trade" on the euro and then to invest in more profitable but riskier emerging markets. It is no coincidence that the World Bank in its latest Global Economic Outlook reduced the estimates of emerging countries from 5,3% to 4,8% in 2014, motivating the filing with the effects of the Ukrainian crisis, the rebalancing of China which is becoming an export oriented to an economy also driven by domestic consumption, the growing political tensions unleashed in many developing countries.
