CITIC Securities: Is the European debt crisis recurring?

Zhitong Finance APP has learned that CITIC Securities has issued a research report stating that the center of gravity of European sovereign credit risk is shifting from the "peripheral countries" to within the "core countries." As of October 2026, the 10-year government bond spread between France and Germany has risen to 150.3bp, at the 99.8th percentile since 2001 and the highest since the 2011 European debt crisis; the France-Italy spread has unusually turned positive to +39.8bp, with French yields overtaking Italian yields, a rare structural break since the founding of the euro area. The driving forces lie in the energy supply-side shock triggered by the Middle East war, which has pushed up inflation and forced a policy pivot by the ECB, compounded by France's structural fragility of "high unemployment + high deficit + high debt" and the V-shaped reversal in its debt interest burden, causing France to be systematically repriced within the core countries. However, the euro area banking system has ample capital and liquidity buffers (CET1 at 16.0%, LCR at 154.9%), and the sovereign credit-bank negative feedback loop has not yet formed; the current situation remains a "repricing" rather than a "crisis."