Germany sold €4.5bn of two-year government bonds at a record low yield of 0.07 per cent, underscoring the strong demand for safer assets amid fears that Greece could be forced out of the eurozone.
The German Bundesbank said the two-year “Schatz”, which was sold with a zero-coupon for the first time, received bids for €7.7bn, compared to a maximum sales target of €5bn.

My colleagues and I found dramatic evidence of this positive relationship between markets and morality in our study of fairness in simple societies—hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic herders, and small-scale sedentary farmers—in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Twelve professional anthropologists and economists visited these societies and played standard ultimatum, public goods, and trust games with the locals. As in advanced industrial societies, members of all of these societies exhibited a considerable degree of moral motivation and a willingness to sacrifice monetary gain to achieve fairness and reciprocity, even in anonymous one-shot situations. More interesting for our purposes, we measured the degree of market exposure and cooperation in production for each society, and we found that the ones that regularly engage in market exchange with larger surrounding groups have more pronounced fairness motivations. The notion that the market economy makes people greedy, selfish, and amoral is simply fallacious.

Other scholars, however, say that government itself is the problem. T. N. Srinivasan, a professor of economics at Yale University, says that political freedoms, to work, need to be complemented by economic freedoms. Mr. Sen, he said, ''doesn't emphasize enough the importance of free markets, trade and access to world markets and capital.'' The reason authoritarian China has grown more rapidly than democratic India, he said, is its embrace of economic liberalization. Mr. Sen, he added, ''seems to have a much dimmer view of globalization than people like me, who see open markets as the best opportunity of the last century'' for countries to grow and develop.

The three indexes ended with what were their biggest weekly percentage declines this year. The Dow was down by 3.5 percent, the S.&P. was off 4.3 percent and the Nasdaq ended 5.3 percent lower in the five-day trading period when compared with the previous week.

Euro zone concerns have overshadowed the financial markets as Greece has tried to form a government in the wake of its election, with fears of a possible default and exit from the currency zone sending ripples through the market. But recent developments indicate the country could form a government in the June election, which might be a supportive factor, he added.