Business News & Financial News

Spanish economy 21st August 2026

Brussels approves Spain’s proposal to bid for one of the European AI gigafactories

The European Commission has approved the creation of a joint venture between ACS, Telefónica, Banco Santander, and SEPI Digital to bid for one of the seven European artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactories that the EU Executive plans to build. The Spanish project, backed by Portugal, features a dual location split between Móra la Nova (Tarragona) and San Fernando de Henares (Madrid). At the end of July, the EU announced the launch…

European economy 21st August 2026

Olli Rehn calls for the creation of a “safe and liquid” European asset to deepen and structure the bond market

Olli Rehn, Governor of the Bank of Finland, has advocated a fresh push to develop European “safe and liquid assets” to support the euro internationally and lower borrowing costs. In his lecture “Back to school: Passing Europe’s triple test” delivered during the OMFIF Nordic SSA forum on 19 August in Helsinki (Finland), Rehn stated that “Europe’s funding needs are large or even huge, and our capital markets should better match…

World economy 20th August 2026

Tension in US debt: Treasury announces it will double bond buybacks and manages to lower long-term yields

The US Department of the Treasury announced yesterday that it will more than double the volume of its public debt buybacks, a move that triggered a sharp drop in bond yields at a time of high market tension. The 30-year yield, which was nearing 5.34%, fell to 5.20%. The 10-year bond yield also dropped by 10 basis points, from 4.75% to 4.65%, driven in large part by the closing of…

rosa garcia consejera caixabank acerinox ence

“Many companies complicate CSRD implementation more than necessary”

Rosa Mª García Piñeiro, board member at Caixabank, Acerinox, and Ence—serving as chair of the sustainability committee for the latter two and as a committee member at Caixabank—explains that “the directive does not set the materiality threshold. The company decides it based on its own criteria. There is nothing in the legislation that prescribes what is material and what is not. The auditor-verifier may have one opinion, the company may…

“We are one of Europe’s leading R&D investors: €1.45 billion last year”

“We need to approach negotiations with the U.S. on terms that are completely different from those currently being proposed”

Says Antonio Bonet, president of the Club of Spanish Exporters and Investors. He points out that “Europe has a single tariff applied by all member states, but the U.S. applies a tariff to each country, meaning it can decide that the tariff applied to Spanish black olives is higher than that for Italian olives, as it did at one point. So there is a part of the negotiation between Europe…

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