The risk of lending money to Portugal against Germany is now about a third lower than it was six months ago. According to a report by ECO, the data is shown by the evolution of the average spread of Treasury bond yields of the two countries along the yield curve.

If six months ago, in order to finance itself on the international market, the Portuguese State had to rely on an average cost of 1.58 percent, about twice as much as investors asked the German State, today that differential has fallen to 34 percent on account of a much more accentuated rise in the yields of German bonds (Bunds) compared to those of Portuguese bonds.

In July, when the European Central Bank (ECB) raised the key interest rates for the euro for the first time since 2011, Portugal's 10-year Treasury bonds were trading at a yield of 2.21 percent and today stand at 3.05 percent.

The 10-year Bunds were trading at a rate of 1.28 percent in July and are now at 2.19 percent. This causes the differential between the yields on the 10-year bonds of the two countries to have shortened 26 percent in the last six months, from 117.4 basis points in July to 87 basis points this Tuesday.

This evolution reveals that the perception of risk that investors have today in lending money to the Portuguese State, to the detriment of the German State, is lower than it was six months ago. And this is even more relevant when one observes, for example, that the spread of yields on French Treasury bonds vis-à-vis bunds dropped by just 13 percent— and in the case of Spanish debt securities there was even a 1 percent increase in the spread.

Only Italy follows the decrease in the risk of national bonds along the entire line of the yield curve, registering a drop of 31 percent in the average spread of the yields of its Treasury bonds compared to their German counterparts.