NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--January 29, 1997--J.P. Morgan today announced it will introduce a Portugal Government Bond Index to track daily total return of the country's domestic government debt. Banco Espirito Santo, one of Portugal's leading banks, will supply daily bond pricing data for the calculation of the index and act as J.P. Morgan's primary information resource for local market conventions. The collaboration between J.P. Morgan and Banco Espirito Santo represents the latest step in a longstanding relationship in capital markets, advisory and financing.
"The Portugal Government Bond Index is an excellent tool for international investors to measure total return performance in Portugal's domestic government bond market," said Chip Levengood, head of Morgan's Portuguese investment banking operation in Madrid. "The introduction of the index reflects growing investor interest in Portugal and the success of the country in developing an orderly and attractive debt market."
Morgan also announced that it expects to include Portugal in its EMU Calculator at the end of February. The EMU Calculator was introduced in October 1996 by J.P. Morgan's foreign exchange research group to gauge market sentiment for a country's likely accession to Monetary Union by measuring forward swap rates. It has become a widely followed market indicator and its results are published regularly in the international press.
Outstanding foreign ownership of Portuguese government debt has risen to PTE 665 billion in 1996 from PTE 31.5 billion in 1995. This dramatic growth reflects the progress of Portugal in developing the securities markets and follows successive steps taken since 1993 in holding regular auctions of 10-year securities, introducing OTC trading, and authorizing a bond futures contract.
The Portuguese index joins Morgan's family of government bond indices, first introduced in 1989, that offer institutional investors active in international fixed income markets a performance benchmark for analyzing the risks and returns in their portfolios. The indices cover all the principal government bond markets and measure the total, principal, and interest returns in each market and can be reported in 18 different currencies. By including only traded issues, the Index provides a realistic measure of market performance for international investors. The J.P. Morgan Government Bond Index is the most widely-used measure of performance of leading government bond markets.
The firm will begin publishing daily Portugal returns in the coming months. Information about the J.P. Morgan Government Bond Index is available on the Internet at (http://www.jpmorgan.com).
CONTACT: J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated
Research:
Bill Falk, 212-648-1052
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Press Relations (London):
Eileen Darko, 171-325-5755
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Press Relations (New York):
Karl Pfalzgraf, 212-648-3904
