Gyula Pleschinger, the head of Hungary’s debt management agency, made some waves at a Friday conference in Pécs when he first said that Hungary’s sovereign debt could be downgrade to junk status, and then quickly reversed himself. While it was a pretty bad gaffe, at least it drew attention away from some other things he said.
Maybe I’m wrong, but this sounded a bit desperate to me:
“We are working hard to have a presence among buyers of Islamic bonds and I hope that in the first half of next year we’ll succeed,” Pleschinger said. “We are also thinking of a ruble bond sale on the Russian market, which we would then swap for euros or dollars.”
On the other hand, given that the day before Pleschinger said this, his organization (the Államadósság-kezelő Központ, better known by its yell-worthy acronym “ÁKK”) had to drastically cut back the size of an offering of 12-month T-bills after bids for the issue came in at a six-year low. ÁKK!
