April 27 (Bloomberg) -- Portugal risks becoming the new Greece.
With a higher debt burden and a slower 10-year growth rate than Greece, Western Europe’s poorest country is being punished by investors as the sovereign debt crisis spreads. The risk premium on Portuguese bonds rose to more than double the past year’s average this month. Portugal’s credit default swaps show investors rank its debt as the world’s eighth-riskiest, worse than for Lebanon and Guatemala.
“We do not ignore that Greece’s particular situation has contagion risks, and we are feeling it,” Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos told reporters in Lisbon on April 22. “The performance of spreads in the market reveals that contagion risk.”
Greek bonds tumbled yesterday, pushing yields to the highest since at least 1998, on speculation over the timing of the European Union bailout package for Greece. Portuguese spreads, the extra yield that investors demand to hold its debt rather than German equivalents, jumped to 218 basis points, the most since at least 1997.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates’ push to convince investors his country will avoid Greece’s fate is being hobbled by an economy that’s expanded less than an annual average of 1 percent for a decade and is reliant on tourism and industries such as cork and pulp.
While Portugal’s public debt of 77 percent of gross domestic product is on a par with that of France, the burden including corporate and household debt exceeds that of Greece and Italy, at 236 percent of GDP. The savings rate is the fourth-lowest among 27 members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, according to the Paris-based group’s data.
