Até o New York Times já percebeu. Apenas o nosso governo ainda não.

"Portugal’s policy makers are understandably confused by the reaction of the markets to their heroic efforts to cut the budget deficit in the face of a rapidly contracting economy. The risk premium on Portuguese government bond has risen to double digit levels while it has fallen for everybody else, except Greece.

But the problem of Portugal is not fiscal policy. It is the excess consumption of the private sector, which for more than 10 years now has become used to spending much more than its income. This can be seen in the large current account deficits the country has run (over 10 percent of G.D.P. for more than 10 years). Their cumulative effect is now a net foreign debt worth more than 100 percent of G.D.P."

(...)

"At first sight one is tempted to say: so what? Why should the markets worry if Portuguese households continue to consume on credit? As long as the government gets its accounts under control, the risk premium on government debt should decline. However, markets factor in a simple lesson learned from this crisis: excess private debt becomes, in the end, public debt. The losses that Portuguese banks are likely to experience when their customers cannot repay their debt as the economy spirals downward will in all likelihood become public debt – just as in Ireland and Spain. What matters in the end is the total debt (public plus private) of the country."