The debt situation in Greece worsened in the third quarter of last year, based on data from EU data firm Eurostat. The information give another reason for the ECB, EU, and IMF to abandon a Greek bailout, along with private market investors who have asked to take a 70% drop in the value of their paper.
The figures for a number of other troubled nations were also fairly poor, which will cause more panic in the capital markets, but the debt to GDP ratio for the entire euro area improved.
At the end of the third quarter of 2011, the government debt to GDP ratio in the euro area (EA17) stood at 87.4%, down compared with 87.7% at the end of the second quarter of 2011.
And,
The highest ratios of government debt to GDP at the end of the third quarter of 2011 were recorded in Greece (159.1%), Italy (119.6%), Portugal (110.1%) and Ireland (104.9%), and the lowest in Estonia (6.1%), Bulgaria (15.0%) and Luxembourg (18.5%).
Among these, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal are either already in the bailout process or are likely to be this year.
Compared with the third quarter of 2010, twenty Member States registered an increase in their debt to GDP ratio at the end of the third quarter of 2011, and seven a decrease. The highest increases in the ratio were recorded in Greece (+20.3 pp), Portugal (+18.9 pp) and Ireland (+16.5 pp), and the largest decreases in Sweden (-1.6 pp), Luxembourg (-1.4 pp) and Bulgaria (-0.9 pp).
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