Confidence Grows As Greek Conservative Party, New Democracy, Leads Race

 | May 28, 2012 03:32AM ET

Markets Overnight
  • Six Greek polls released over the weekend show that the Greek conservative party, New Democracy, is leading the race to become the biggest party ahead of the left wing party Syriza. The average of the six polls suggests that New Democracy would get 27.7% of the vote and Syriza 25.0%. The polls also suggest that New Democracy and PASOK together would get around 166 of the seats, clearly enough to form a proeuro majority government in the 300-seat parliament. Note though that there are still three weeks to the election, that more than 10% of the potential voters are still undecided and that Syriza gained a lot of support in the final week in the first round.
  • In Ireland new opinion polls ahead of the referendum on the ‘fiscal compact’ from the Irish Times and the  Sunday Business Post show the ‘Yes’ lead holding firm at around 57% (after undecided voters are excluded), but the level of ‘Don’t Knows’ is still high. The referendum takes place on Thursday.
  • Risk appetite improved slightly on Friday in the European session. The improved sentiment from the European session carried over to the US session, but a minor selloff just before closing sent US equities in negative territory. The S&P500 ended the trade down by 0.2%. The S&P future has increased around 1% in Asian trading. In Asia stock indices are trading with no clear direction this morning. Nikkei is unchanged while Hang Seng is up by 0.2%. Also US bond yields decreased slightly on Friday with 10-year treasury yields ending the week back below 1.75%. In FX markets the EUR/USD has this morning rebounded to around 1.26.