Luis Alcaide | Little has emerged from the face-to-face meeting between Xi Jinping and Pedro Sánchez during the G7 meeting in Bali. Only the Spanish Prime Minister’s request to his Chinese counterpart to exercise his best offices with Vladimir Putin to stop his invasion and destruction of Ukraine. Nothing has come to light about the bilateral relations between Spain and China, despite the fact that China is the leading international…
Luis Alcaide | At the end of July, Spain’s trade deficit amounted to 38.524 billion euros compared to 6.995 billion in 2021. The explanation was none other than the imbalance between purchases and sales with China and the countries of the Middle East, amounting to 38.503 billion euros. The People’s Republic of China has become the main supplier of goods to Spain. In the first seven months of the year,…
Luis Alcaide | Espionage and misunderstandings between Catalan supporters of Esquerra and Spanish supporters of the PSOE. The Spanish state, like any other, is doing its duty in the face of possible aggressions against its integrity and the liberty of its citizens. The director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, explains herself in the Congress of Deputies. The pro-independence parties and the most left-wing leftists do not quite accept the arguments…
Luis Alcaide | In the wake of his meeting with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the main opposition candidate Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, recently elected president of the Partido Popular, complained that he had not been heard on his proposals on taxation: a reduction in personal income tax for taxpayers with lower incomes in order to compensate for the greater frequency of the effects of inflation. This is neither a pro-vo¬lu¬tionary nor…
Luis Alcaide (Capital Madrid) | The current account balance of payments recorded a surplus of 8.428 billion euros in 2021, when exports grew by 21% and imports by 24%, with China as the leading supplier (11.9% of our imports vs. 9.6% for Germany and 9.1% for France). In the face of the avalanche of unquieting news, Spain’s political and economic health in the first months of this year 2022 and…
Luis Alcaide | Early morning of 26 February 2022. Invasion of Russian troops. I don’t know whether I’m in Madrid or in the Bucharest of that morning on 21 August 1968. At that time, 170,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers were invading Czechoslovakia, and the Prague Spring was a political and economic threat to the communist bloc. Czechoslovakia, which was a developed pre-World War II society and economy, offered in 1968 economic…
Luis Alcaide | In most European states the wealth tax has been abolished. Only France has kept it for the taxpayer, but without physically suffocating the taxpayer. Another thing is the municipal taxes on property tenure, which exist almost everywhere in the world. The latter are key to local budgets, based on the occupation of a municipal space and in return for the services of police and real estate surveillance,…
Luis Alcaide | The evolution of Spain’s export trade confirms the viability of the economy, whose rhythm is being maintained thanks to its strong export sector. Political labyrinths aside, according to the latest available data for the month of November, the increase in sales of Spanish goods to foreign markets exceeds the average increase in the EU, as well as that of the main European competitors. The number of exporters…
Luis Alcaide | In the Romanised Spain of the first two centuries, the so-called Silver Age, an Aragonese, Quintilian, whom his countryman Martial would call “summus mo¬de¬rator juven¬tae”, called for “men of talent, capable of living in a cordial world and participating in public affairs”. Centuries later, in a Spain that was already moving towards modernity, the poet of the upper classes, Campoamor, described those men of talent as “a…
Luis Alcaide | A British parliamentary spokesman and former development minister, Andrew Mitchell, has declared it in no uncertain terms: “The UK is losing its reputation as a credible jurisdiction. Our (British) companies have become vehicles for the laundering of money. The vulgarity of the internal market, the weakness of regulations and the pathetic response to organised crime are being used to facilitate all kinds of misdemeanours. Many EU Europeans…