The number of jobless people registered with Spain’s unemployment offices stood at 3,7 million at end-December 2016, representing a fall of 390,534 people, or 9.54%, for the year as a whole. This is the fourth consecutive anual decline and the biggest since the historic series started in 1996, according to the Labour Ministry.
J.L. M. Campuzano (Spanish Banking Association) | The Spanish economy’s deleveraging process is still ongoing. But the data for Q3 shows different trends in financing capacity depending on the sector.
It looks like 2017 will present a lot of opportunities and challenges for the Spanish economy. It will grow at a good pace, creating jobs, with a minority government obliged to seek consensus on issues like education and pensions. Meeting our deficit commitments to Europe will remain a challenge after 2016.
Every national and international economic organisation and the most trustworthy research houses agree in predicting a deceleration in the Spanish economy in 2017, due mainly to the slowdown in private consumption.
Spain’s main political parties PP, PSOE and Cuidadanos, with the exception of Podemos, have agreed to reform the electricity tariff discount rate, as well prohibit electricity cuts for those consumers considered “very vulnerable.” Analysts at ACF believe it will be important to confirm the final conditions and the net impact for the electricity companies, but a priori they don’t expect this will be significant.
Spain’s Labour Minister has proposed that people should stop work at 6 pm. Where has that idea come from? And furthermore, where’s the good in that? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to work towards to make the working day as flexible as possible within each company?
Just minutes after the the EU ruling on ‘floor clauses’ was released, the banks in Spain’s blue-chip Ibex 35 index ended up dropping over 10%. But most of the lenders recovered ground by the end of the session. Afi estimates the ruling will affect the banking sector as a whole to the tune of some 4.5 billion euros.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that Spanish banks have to return all the extra money they charged clients affected by the ‘floor clauses’ included in their mortgage contracts. The court has rejected the idea of a time-limited retroactive effect because it is “incomplete and insufficient”.
The appointment of Sebastián Abella and Ana Martínez-Pina as the chairman and deputy chairman of the CNMV has caused some controversy, revealing the confusion there is over what profile candidates for heading up any institution should have. You can choose people who are totally uncontaminated to lead any organisation, without having any link to its activities. But an increasingly more complex financial and stock market environment requires experienced professionals, not rookies.
A lot of matters need to be addressed in Spain’s banking sector in the next four years. Urgent matters are the full privatisation of Bankia and the irrelevant BMN; completing the transformation of the savings banks (La Caixa, Kutxabank, Ibercaja, Unicaja and Liberbank), the adjustment of Banco Popular and the retirement of the post-war bankers.