While national identity tensions belong to an ongoing debate, the fiscal irritation that Catalonia feels can be easily soothed. Madrid must offer a fairer treatment to a region whose economic output sets the best hopes for Spain to exit the crisis.
MADRID | This doesn’t work as a safety net for the Spanish banking sector to recover from its current weaknesses. It would amount to a neat, direct mechanism for entities to cash their toxic loans at the taxpayer’s expense. But Madrid is still in time to amend its bad bank, advises economist JP Marín Arrese.
When you hear tourism in Spain, you may imagine local mayors receiving bribes from developers to re-qualify a piece of natural landscape that will be lost for ever. Think again. It is a strong, diverse and worth-a-fight industry.
The rule of merely linking wages to productivity would have had the opposite effect, argues economist Jordi Paniagua. Spain’s productivity is counter-cyclical, he points out, and hasn’t stopped growing since 2007.
MADRID | Telefónica Ventures and Caixa Capital TIC, a specialised digital technology fund of La Caixa, announced Tuesday its first investment. The joint platform will inject €3 million in addFleet, a company specialised in intelligent systems for transportation. The investment in addFleet is the first by Telefónica Ventures in Spain after having completed similar operations in other international technology companies such as Quantenna, Joyent and Boku. Telefónica and La Caixa said the plan is to promote the…
The divide between journalistic duties and pleasing the masses looks excessively thin in Spain. When news media from virtually every ideological branch come together only to relentlessly bash a government, it may be time for a reflection.
By Joaquim Clemente, valenciaplaza.com | All finance activity planned at the autonomous government of the Valencia region must now be approved by the Spanish Treasury in Madrid before going ahead. If regions in Spain that have sought a bailout from the central administration follow the Valencia pattern, they would have seen their financial rights severely limited as a condition to tap loans from the state agency ICO, a Treasury’s credit…
LONDON/MADRID | President Mariano Rajoy should manage to take this week a breath, although it will probably feel too weak. A simple look at the curve of Spain’s government debt now shows a steep upward gap between the internal rate of return of two-year bonds and the cost of the medium and long-term credit for the country. Indeed, 24-month debt paper’s IRR has tightened by more than 450 basic points…
José Luis Marco, CAPITAL MADRID | Spanish government’ two first RDL condemned more than one financial institution to the red throughout this exercise. The sentence has not been limited to the four entities under the FROB umbrella but has also reached some entities that are in the process of integration with other groups, such as CEISS Bank, Caja Duero Spain, in full merger with Unicaja, to take losses of 125…
By Tania Suárez, Madrid | It seems that September will be a busy month, the beginning of a year full of interesting appointments for investors. As noted from JPMorgan, markets have already priced in aggressive Spanish debt buying by the European Central Bank, “but the risks shall remain high.” Many sources agree that the ECB is not expected to provide many details of the SMP. “There’s not a clear indication…