Today's Major Market Move - Cyprus Equity Market Down 8% for the Day

As a result of the worsening situation with Italian and Portuguese sovereign debt, there's a bloodbath going on in European stock markets right now. All the other news sources will be reporting on the usual suspects: Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc., but the largest downward moves at the moment are in Cyprus and Hungary.


The Cypriot equity markets are down a vertigo inducing 8% (imagine a 1000 point drop in the DOW in a single day). Hungary had managed to stay out of the limelight for the past few months, showing resilience after it saw dramatic weakening in it's currency at the beginning of this year. Chart of the USD - Hungarian Forint cross:


All of the recent gains in the equity markets of the PIGS have essentially been lost and those markets are now plumbing new lows for 2011. Oh how we pine for the days when a bailout-induced market boost would last longer than 2 weeks. Here's the FTSE MIB Italian Equity Index:



Italy and Spain are of course the big kahunas in the european debt minefield, but there has been almost no mention of Cyprus in the media. As mentioned here in an earlier post, Cyprus has a GDP twice that of Iceland and will most likely also require a bailout in the not-too-distant future.

(Click on the images for a larger view.
Click here for the current performance of global equity indexes.
Click here for the current chart of the USDHUF cross.
Click here for the current chart of the FTSE MIB Index.)