$125 billion bailout for the Spanish banking sector

After Ireland, Portugal and Greece, the financial contagion has finally spread to Spain, as the Southern-European country asked on Sunday for a bailout worth as much as $125 billion dollars. The money will most likely come from the European Financial Stability Facility and the yet-to-be ratified European Stability Mechanism and are supposed to go towards the recapitalization of Spanish liquidity stripped banks. If the EU does not start taking bolder steps towards more integration Italy may go next.

Risk off as EU summit talks dissapoint

The risk markets sold off today as a reaction to the news that UK rejected the European fiscal and budgetary constraints, followed by Intel's 1 billion revenue slash. Ratings agencies Moody's, Standard and Poor's and Fitch were again late at the party in expressing their worries about the long term sustainability of the rescue plan. Fitch declared that last week's summit did little to address the regions sovereign debt crisis and predicted a "significant economic downturn" across the region. Standard and Poor's added that European officials might need another financial shock to get it moving. Gold sold off today as well, in what is a more and more obvious correlation with equity markets. The precious metal is losing its safe haven status.

What about the other perypheral EU countries: Hungary

With most of the investor focus nowadays on the PIIGS "fallen angels", and  on the forthcoming US presidential campaign, not much has been heard about some of the other EU countries: Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria. Rumors in the market are that banks there are slowly withdrawing capital and scaling out of their less profitable businesses, but is there any cause of concern regarding their financial stability ? How did they surf the crisis wave and do they still require a safeguard ? Are they going to be left out of the core-Europe, in case such plan materializes or not ?