Following the publication of the Financial Stability report, Bank of Spain governor Pablo Hernández de Cos highlights the significant increase in public debt, which will have to be faced once the crisis is over. The governor points out that it will be necessary to implement a medium-term fiscal consolidation programme and implement the necessary structural reforms.
The sale of non-performing loans (NPLs) in Spain totalled € 22 billion in 2019, 63% lower than the 60 billion registered the previous year, according to data from Prime Yield’s ‘Keep an Eye on the NPL & REO Markets’ report.
Spain’s central bank highlighted the need for structural changes in the public pension system to ensure its long-term viability, while warning against the reversal of those already made. According to a simulation exercise presented by the entity, the revaluation index introduced after the 2013 reforms, which decoupled the rise in pensions from CPI, was the main reason behind lower pension expenditure.
Círculo de Empresarios | The Bank of Spain forecasts that the Spanish economy will embark on a gradual path of deceleration until 2022, and therefore maintains its 2% and 1.7% annual growth forecasts for 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Joan Tapia | The Bank of Spain, by raising its growth forecast for 2019 from 2.2% to 2.4%, has confirmed that the Spanish economy has begun the year better than expected. Thus are undone the catastrophic forecasts of some analysts and the political right.
Fernando G. Urbaneja | A short list of urgent and possible reforms to regenerate and modernise Spanish democracy would include improving the quality and reputation of state institutions, especially the administration of justice and those entities described as independent, with the Bank of Spain at the front of the queue.
For a long time, Spain has had a “debt pending” in terms of budgetary stability. And, for the time being, the current scenario leads us to think that balancing the public finances is a difficult objective to achieve in the medium-term. Added to that problem is the high level of government debt.
In a conference by Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Governor of the Bank of Spain from 2006 to 2012, at the Ramón Areces Foundation in Madrid, he tried to find out whether, within the technology-generated changes, there is one that is “disruptive”, that can produce a radical change in the banking activity of such importance that, as is happening with other industries, it forces private banks to transform themselves into companies very different from those that exist today.
Spanish households reduced their savings efforts marginally in the third quarter of 2017. Despite the Spanish banks’ attempts to offer positive returns on deposits against a backdrop of negative interest rates from the ECB, families are looking for greater returns from other kinds of financial assets like investment funds.
The Spanish Parliament has set up a special Committee to scrutinise what led to the financial crisis ten years ago. But the craving for finding individual culprits will overrun any reasonable attempt to search for the simple truth that no one could foresee the crisis.