CaixaBank Research (Oriol Aspachs) | No doubt you already have an opinion on this. We constantly hear qualified people emphatically and assertively stating their opinion about our current situation, about where we are headed and, what is even more difficult but much more tempting to predict, about what we have to do to change our destination. The world is overdiagnosed, as CIDOB states in its latest report on the 2022…
Bankinter | Iberdrola has won the lion’s share in the offshore wind auction in the UK, known as Scotwind. The Spanish power company will develop three large scale projects: two of them with floating technology, which they will develop in collaboration with Shell and the third on a fixed structure. The total amount of power awarded to Iberdrola in this auction is 7.000 MW. The areas adjudicated are: Marram Wind,…
The meeting between Pedro Sánchez and Olaf Scholz in Madrid on Monday did not go as expected… at La Moncloa. A lot of green harmony, a lot of social democracy and progressivism. Germany, however, made it clear that the countries of the Union must start withdrawing stimuli and recovering a fiscal discipline suspended by the pandemic: “We look to the past to learn from it and project ourselves into the…
Scope Ratings (Sam Theodore & Keith Mullin)| Regulation is one of the two main drivers of change for the banking industry (the other driver being technology). Supervisory adoption of ML for the Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process (ICAAP) may in turn change the way the industry and the markets assess bank credit risk. More precisely, the future use by regulators of ML for ICAAP will give a powerful impetus to…
Banc Sabadell | Italian infrastructure firm Atlantia would have made a bid valued at ~1 billion euros for 100% of Yunex (0.7% capitalisation of Siemens), according to Bloomberg. Yunex’s business focuses on mobility signalling. We recall that in the last few months a competitive sale process had started, including participants like KKR or Bridgepoint. This is positive news, although of limited impact, as it was already known that a sale…
Bankinter |Corporate results will be one of the major catalysts, but also the reduced impact of Covid-19, with new medicines to fight it. Inflation will moderate im the second half of the year and central banks will slowly normalise their monetary policies, which is reasonable against a backdrop of economic expansion. Whatsmore, financial conditions will be accomodative and liquidity will be high. We envisage an average upside potential for the…
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…
Samantha North | Freedom of movement in Europe was always something I took for granted. I saw Europe as part of our heritage, despite the grumblings of euroskeptics and sly articles in the British press about the perils of straight bananas and the metric system. Perhaps the EU is an “imagined community” too. But countries working together, no matter how flawed the process, is the only route we have to improving the world. It’s a project I’m determined to be part of.
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…
Santander Corporate & Investment Banking | New car sales in Europe (EU+EFTA+UK) fell by 17% to 864,119 units, the worst November performance since the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association began recording data in 1993. Registrations were only 0.8% higher than in the first 11 months of last year. Germany (-31.7%), Italy (-24.6%) and Spain (-12.3%) recorded double-digit falls and France a contraction of 3.2%. In contrast, car sales in the UK…