Spain's government had to pay out higher rates today to auction off nearly €4 billion of bonds amid deep concerns in the European debt markets over Greece.
Demand was strong for the Spanish government bonds as investors applied for a total of €10.3 billion of debt, but the government had to offer higher returns.
Debt markets appeared nervous after Moody's Investors Service sharply downgraded Greece's debt and warned that the odds of a Greek debt-default were 50-50.
The Spanish Treasury sold a total of €3.953 billion in three and four-year government bonds. It sold €2.753 billion three-year bonds with an average annual return, or yield, of 4.037%, up from 3.568% at the last comparable auction on April 7.
The Treasury also sold €1.2 billion in four-year bonds at an average yield of 4.23%, up sharply from 2.964% at the last comparable auction on September 2, 2010.
Spanish jobless queues shrink in May
Spain's jobless queues shrank in May for the second month running, the government said today.
But the number of job seekers remained well over four million people, declining 1.87% from the previous month to 4.19 million, the Labour Ministry figures showed. The figure was up 3.04% from a year earlier, however.
Unemployment had peaked in March at 4.33 million people - the highest number since these figures were first collated in their current format in 1996, it said.
The Spanish unemployment rate hit 21.29% in the first quarter of 2011, the highest in the industrialised world, according to separate figures released earlier by the National Statistics Institute.
