“The Greek offer is not sufficient and they have to go away to come up with a revised plan,” said a spokesman for the German Finance Ministry. The Greeks must first have a plan that satisfies the Germans which this comment states they clearly don’t yet and then the Greek Parliament will vote on it this weekend. This said, whatever package gets voted on in Greece is basically an up or down vote on euro membership so we are entering another uncertain weekend for global markets. A failed vote will likely lead to a hard default which may be what the Greeks want at this point where a clean slate can be established. As we await, CDS is wider for a 2nd day for all US banks and the European iTraxx financial CDS index is wider by about 14 bps to 217 bps up from 192 on Tuesday. The other news of note is in Asia as Chinese loan growth data in Jan was well below expectations at 738.1b yuan vs the est of 1T yuan. Also, M2 rose 12.4%, below forecasts of up 13.7%. Because of the lunar holiday though, this figures were likely distorted. Their trade data was also likely impacted as imports fell 15.3%, much more than the expected decline of 3.6% while export fell a touch as expected. The loan and M2 data came out after the Shanghai index closed up slightly.
