MADRID | By Fernando G. Urbaneja| The Spanish new regulation follows the old principle that in times of crisis people should be working more and earning less. More working hours are added, up to nearly 1,800 per year, a fact that Germany should note in order to dismiss the cliché of Southern Europeans being lazy.
MADRID | By Raimundo Poveda, former banking regulation director at Bank of Spain | The Single Supervisory Mechanism can be late. The EU banking watchdog has still to be formally founded, decide who’ll be part of its leadership, create an internal organization network and define its financing sources.
By Alessio Pissanò | While the European banking system is shaken by the worst crisis ever and the Italian Monte Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, is falling down, the European Commission seems ready to water down the Liikanen Committee’s recommendations about ringfencing of proprietary banking trading.
MADRID | By Tania Suárez | Analyst at Hanseatic Brokerhouse, Juan Enrique Cadiñanos believes the contraction of the Spanish premium risk is the consequence of sounder public finances. Cadiñanos expects a “difficult year” for the Spanish economy, though.
Whether officials in the EU institutions like it or not, the institutions feel remote from most of Europe. And the democratic deficit has grown wider as a result of the eurozone crisis.
CRACOW | By Matthew Shearman | Ahead of the end of immigration controls on Romania and Bulgaria in January 2014, some UK ministers are thinking of running a campaign to deter a repeat of the 2004 “wave” of immigration when eight former communist countries gained EU working rights. But the eurozone crisis makes this prospect less likely.
In the current environment of huge indebtedness and low inflation, with sizeable unspent resources, a strong euro adds insult to injury.
Presseurop.eu | Kostas Onisenko | Victims of the Greek crisis and its consequences, non-European migrants have started to head home. In a centre in Athens, they talk bitterly of the setback that repatriation represents for them.
Uncertainty is driven by a scenario with lower growth rates for GDP, trade, capital formation and employment, and by a number of perceived risk factors related to the Eurozone crisis, and the United States fiscal cliff.
MADRID | Spain has a lot to learn from political life in Britain or the US, where bipartisan broad agreement to engage into an objective and transparent way of working gives rise to thorough sensible proposals against corruption.