Friday, June 22, 2012

Eurozone Breakup Probabilities

Quick, look at the prediction markets!

The Intrade prediction markets currently predict a 30% chance that one country will leave the Euro by the end of 2012, a 59% chance that one country will leave by the end of 2013, and 60% chance that breakup will happen by the end of 2014. Looking at the graphs for the period since June 10, one can see that the June 17th election results brought down the two nearer term probabilities by a substantial amount, while the longer term 2014 probability barely moved.

It's also helpful to look at the spreads between the 2013 and 2012 prices and between the 2014 and 2012 prices.


From the graph of the spreads, it's very obvious that the markets perceived the recent election as just "kicking the can down the road". Longer term probabilities diverged from the near term ones, but the longer term probabilities converged to each other. From this data, it seems that the markets perceive the probability of a breakup by 2014 is almost equal to the probability of a breakup by 2013. Either way, things look bleak for the Eurozone.

No comments:

Post a Comment