OT: OTTAWA — With no economic data reports to guide them Monday, investors once again focused their attention on the Greek debt crisis, and fears that the country won’t be able to make its next loan payment.
OTTAWA — With no economic data reports to guide them Monday, investors once again focused their attention on the Greek debt crisis, and fears that the country won’t be able to make its next loan payment.
“It’s Groundhog Day all over again,” Gerry Brockelsby, a money manager at Marquest Asset Management Inc. in Toronto, told Bloomberg. “It’s the same story: the continuing difficulties in Europe and particularly the Greece situation. It’s also the ramification any problems with the Greece deal would have in other countries in similar positions. It’s a contagion problem.”
At midday in Toronto, the benchmark S&P/TSX composite index was down by about 103 points, or 0.84 per cent, to 12,161.
The price of crude oil was down $2.31 to $85.65 U.S. a barrel in electronic trading in New York at midday, and gold lost $24.70 to $1,790 U.S. an ounce.
The Canadian dollar was up/down 1.13 cents to $1.0102 U.S. in late-morning trading.
The Dow Jones industrial average was down about 186 points, or 1.61 per cent, to 11,324 at midday, and the Nasdaq composite index had slipped 22 points, or 0.83 per cent, to 2,601.
Among world indexes, the Nikkei in Tokyo was one of the few to advance on Monday, it gained 2.25 per cent, while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong fell 2.76 per cent. In Europe, London’s FTSE slipped 1.93 per cent, the CAC in Paris fell 2.73 per cent and Frankfurt’s DAX dropped 2.48 per cent.
