Greece desperately needs people to buy its bonds. So what does it do? It excludes potential buyers, specifically hedge funds:

Greece ordered its bankers to exclude hedge funds from a bond offering this week in an effort to punish the speculators it blames for destabilising its debt markets.

In his February 2010 Investment Outlook, Bill Gross examines historical examples of deleveraging and reregulating conditions through the works of others. He first calls on Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s recent publication, This Time Is Different. The book studies eight centuries of financial crises and discusses how public debt expands after a financial crisis. Gross highlights the authors’ main conclusions, which finishes with “Once a country’s public debt exceeds 90% of GDP, its economic growth rate slows by 1%.”

Gross continues to echo the authors’ conclusions with the confirmation that

On Friday, a combination of better-than-expected data and easing sovereign concerns combined to deliver some very constructive price action in equity markets, with key bourses across Europe and the US making seven-week highs. Commodity prices strengthened and the Baltic Dry Freight Index posted a strong increase for a third consecutive session (and the seventh consecutive increase in total) to make a six-week high.

Of course, the highlight was the US non-farm payrolls report which revealed a 36k decline in February following a net 35k of upward revisions, and this despite the fact that just over 1 million people reported that bad weather had prevented them from turning up at work. Whilst this outcome was only slightly better than formal expectations, I think that most investors (including myself) had been braced for downside surprise. With the labour force also increasing, the unemployment rate was steady at 9.7%, suggesting that the October 2009 reading of 10.1% may well have been the peak.