The arrival at the Bank of Spain of José Luis Escrivá, who left his ministerial portfolio with Sánchez to take control of the Bank of Spain and end the critical tone that the issuing bank maintained regarding the government’s economic policy, has already claimed several victims.
The most prominent, a few days ago, was that of Ángel Gavilán, the entity’s Director of Economics, who, after presenting the issuing bank’s latest annual report, chose to resign. Among other things, because the latest BdE report avoids, for example, any critical reference to the sustainability of the pension system. Perhaps because the latest reform of the system – which has skyrocketed the cost of pensions – was promoted by Escrivá himself, who insists they are sustainable. This is despite the fact that the injection of state funds so that pensions can be paid is now approaching €60 billion a year, that is, equivalent to the entire Spanish public deficit.
What we did not imagine is that, as economists Miquel Puig in La Vanguardia and José García Domínguez in The Objective denounce, the Bank of Spain had chosen to become just another government propagandist, willing to skew any information and even lie for the greater glory of the government. This is what happened in the latest annual report, which states that “Productivity gains have been more intense in Spain than in the euro area as a whole over the period 2019-2024, especially compared to countries such as France and Germany.”
A completely false piece of data since, as Miquel Puig points out, not only has there been no productivity gain in Spain during the last five years, but, on the contrary, the value of such a critical indicator, productivity per worker, has decreased by 2% over the same period.
As José García Dominguez explains, “we are witnessing the emergence of what we could already baptize as the Escrivá doctrine, the eagerness of the new Bank of Spain to try to provide a veneer of theoretical legitimacy to the government’s economic policy, that based on the very crude and short-sighted principle of expanding GDP via massive incorporations of unskilled immigrants from the Third World… In Spain, as in other European countries, the fear of being associated with far-right positions and having to face the consequent stigma has ultimately acted as the most powerful and effective instrument of censorship, which is none other than self-censorship. And hence, by the way, the resounding silence in the public forum of so many solvent and prestigious economists in the face of such crude and gross manipulations as the one that the new Bank of Spain has just put into circulation. In short, if the aim is for the banking authority to also wallow in the mud pool of daily political bickering, Escrivá could not have started his job better.
