Incredible: Social Media May Have Pushed Up Borrowing Costs for Greece

As incredible as this sounds a group of researchers from the University of Macedonia claim that social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and other Internet sharing platforms could of possibly played an important role in the deepening of the Greek economic crisis.

According to them, information and comments on social media platforms –like the twitter hashtag #Grexit- influenced the Eurozone bond markets.

     “The Greek economic situation and the Greek bailout have led to abnormal returns on sovereign bonds” the authors write, and add “To sum up, we show that the Greek debt crisis related information in social media and Google search queries does influence financial markets. This is mainly so for Greece and Ireland, and to a much lesser extent for Italy, Portugal and Spain.”

However, researchers say that they cannot compare results for all European countries hit by the debt crisis, as the construction of indexes is based on different sets of key-words and key-phrases.

Read the paper HERE