Dismal day for banks and airlines

BANKS and airlines had another dismal day on the stock market yesterday with building firm CRH also suffering.

Aer Lingus saw its shares fall 1.4% to 68 cent, while Ryanair dropped almost 2% to €3.54.

AIB was down close to 4% at €1.30 and Bank of Ireland fell 3.4% to €1.48. Irish Life and Permanent was hard hit, falling 7.7% to €2.60.

The ISEQ Index dropped a further 67.18 points as world markets continue to suffer from the ongoing Greek debt crisis.

In the construction sector, CRH, which reported a 14% drop in sales for the first four months of the year at its AGM yesterday, saw its shares decline 52c to €19.51. In Europe stocks plunged for a second day, extending a two-month low.

Portugal’s PSI-20 Index dropped 1.5% as Moody’s Investors Service placed the country’s ratings on review for possible downgrade. Greece’s EFGEurobank Ergasias and Spain’s Banco Popular Espanol slid more than 4%.

In Britain the benchmark FTSE 100 Index sank to the lowest level since February.

“We are being faced with a huge problem of sovereign debt in Japan, in the US and in some of the biggest European governments,” said Andrew Freris, senior investment strategist for Asia at BNP Paribas Wealth Management. “What Greece did is that it took the current situation and made it into a sort of cartoon size, it exaggerated everything.”

National benchmark indexes fell in all 18 Western European markets.

Meanwhile, according to statistics from the Irish Stock Exchange in the first quarter of the year equity turnover increased by 8% to €11.7 billion. However trading volumes in equities quoted on the exchange and the daily average number of trades were lower than the figures recorded in Q1 2009.