French Yields Close In on Italy With Safe Market Image in Ruins

(Bloomberg) -- First Ireland, then Portugal and Spain, and now Greece. One after another, countries at the heart of Europe’s debt crisis more than a decade ago are outshining France, as its standing as a safe-and-stable bond market disintegrates.

As the political crisis in Paris drags on, the question on everyone’s mind — unthinkable a year ago — is whether France will soon have higher borrowing costs than Italy, the region’s traditional poster-child of fiscal profligacy.

French bonds won some respite this week after Prime Minister Michel Barnier made concessions in his 2025 budget plans — a bid to avert a no-confidence motion that could topple the government. But the long-term trend is striking: the gap between 10-year bonds of the two countries is already less than 40 basis points, nearly half what it was as recently as September.

“Never say never,” said Daniel Loughney, head of fixed income at Mediolanum International Funds Ltd. “It may need to take spreads close to Italy for the French elites to do something.”

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Until midway through this year, French bonds were generally regarded as a proxy for German bunds, the region’s safest asset. But then President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election in June, tipping the country into crisis when no party won an absolute majority. The political turbulence hampered efforts to reduce a budget deficit that’s swollen to an expected 6.1% of economic output this year.

At around 3%, 10-year French yields are now higher than those of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. While that’s partly a story of France’s decline, it also reflects those countries’ push to slash vast debt piles that once imperiled the integrity of the eurozone.

But matching Italy — the bloc’s third largest economy after Germany and France — would be the most symbolic milestone yet. For years, Italian government bonds, known as BTPs, were the region’s most volatile bonds as Rome veered from one political crisis to the next, unnerving investors and making it harder to rein in a debt pile equivalent to around 140% of gross domestic product.

“It would be a very significant shift,” said Evelyne Gomez-Liechti, a strategist at Mizuho International Plc. “Italy has a larger debt market versus Spain and other peripherals, so in that sense it is more comparable.”

Investors are looking for other countries to buy — and Italy is “very liquid and all-in yields are attractive,” she added. Rates on three-month French bills are already above those of Italy.