Adam Vettese (eToro) | In the UK on Monday, dividends were in the spotlight as £7.5bn of payments are due from banks including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland over the next few weeks.
Yves Bonzon (Julius Baer) | We are therefore moving much faster than expected towards a macroeconomic policy cocktail that combines monetary and fiscal policy (Modern Monetary Theory, MMT). In concrete terms, private agents (households and companies) who are currently losing precious income, must be able to continue to pay their bills in order to avoid a credit crunch against which monetary policy, even unconventional, can do nothing in isolation. Offering state guarantees for loans that relieve their immediate cash flow stress is a good solution in the very short term.
Pablo Fernández (IESE) | The drop in the Spanish Stock Market in March (up to Friday 27) was 22.9%. It is a significant fall, but there have been (so far) greater ones. Looking at the stock market performance over the last 80 years, it can be verified that the Spanish bourse has already had much bigger declines than those of March 2020.
José Ramón Díez Guijarro (Bankia Estudios) | Extraordinary measures have allowed financial markets to stabilize during the week. With one exception, as it seems that the concept of urgency is different in Europe from that in the rest of the world. The European summit on the coronavirus ended with the decision to take two weeks to analyse proposals. Even in a situation like the present one, northern European countries are not prepared to mutualise risks. We will see if all this does not end up affecting the waterline of the European project.
A.J.A | Last Friday 27, after a cabinet meeting, the Spanish government issued a decree prohibiting companies from firing employees by “taking advantage of the coronavirus” (sic). with absurdities such as this one, it ensures that the recovery will not be in a V shape, or even in a U shape, but that the country will get into a prolonged crisis in L.
Spanish watchdog CNMV considers that the terms of SIX’s takeover bid for BME have been adapted to current standards, while the contents of the prospectus submitted, after the latest amendments on 25 March 2020, are sufficient. SIX is offering €33.4 per share. The acceptance period is 43 calendar days from the business day following the publication of the takeover announcement. One of the major new features of the transaction is SIX’s commitment to maintaining BME’s activities and locations in Spain for 10 years, as opposed to the initial four years.
Iwa Salami via The Conversation | Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will probably not be killed off by the COVID-19 crisis or indeed any other market event. With the growing market in crypto lending, these services look pivotally positioned to replace traditional banking services in the coming years. If more countries make similar moves to the ones I’ve highlighted above, crypto-assets could even become entrenched in the financial mainstream very soon.
Daniel Wagner | The West can learn a lot from the response of the governments of China, Singapore and South Korea, which clamped down, instructed their populations to stay at home and ensured that they did so. These governments did not panic or overreact; they simply did not under-react, as America and much of the West have done.
The number of Aena passengers has fallen by 45.5% so far in March, although it has accelerated to -97% in recent days. Therefore, its traffic forecasts for 2020 are no longer valid (+1.9%). To cushion the impact, Aena has reorganised the activity of its airports with the aim of temporarily reducing costs by approximately 43M euros per month.
In a scenario of oil prices (Brent) at $35 and Gas (Henry Hub) at $1.8, Repsol has drawn up a contingency plan to deal with the impact of COVID-19. This includes cancelling the extra share buyback for 5% of capital due to be executed in May, which, totalled 1Bn euros, but maintaining its dividend at €1 per share. The company also flags that it has sufficient liquidity to deal with this situation at least until 2024.