MADRID | By Ricardo Cantalapiedra | capitalmadrid | A significant body of proof suggests the disasters in the sector were caused not by the institutions itself, but by their executive members. The Bank of Spain will be charged with supervisory powers.
The new set of rules on restructuring and liquidation of ailing banking institutions planned to be approved next Friday confers full command to the Spanish government. The Bank of Spain will exclusively identify solvency failures and pit in place an early warning mechanism to redress potential deviations. But once public money is involved the task is conferred to a formally independent body, the FROB, but under tight governmental control. Politicians…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | Here you are, Spain’s updated accrued passive account with Target2 or intra-system operations pending compensation. Its sheer volume and the scale by which it increases clearly expose that we are in for our troubles. How can the euro zone authorities postpone solutions until September? The scenario does not look good. The chart registers data from the Bank of Spain until June. The debt goes…
MADRID | The Spanish government had good reasons to avoid Mr Ordóñez’s appearance in the parliamentary committee reviewing Bankia’s plight. His cold determined performance flatly exposed gross government failure in addressing the financial crisis. His indictment was based on the nagging fact Spain risk premium ranked last December markedly lower than Italy’s and now even Ireland shows a better record. He accused the government of leaving aside the Bank of…
MADRID | Words containing the Latin suffix “tio” tend to raise passionate sentiments. Just think of “revolution” or even “Constitution”, a rather harmless expression nowadays that fuelled bloody rifts in the 19th century. Banking “resolution” is leading to similar high-pitched controversies. Not to mention “liquidation”, a reference readily subject to censorship as the Bank of Spain governor has recently discovered. The recommendation to ensure his full independence apparently will have to wait…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | At FTAlphaville there recently was talk about the Spanish banking system. Sí, that particular banking system that, according to the Bank of Spain governor Fernández Ordóñez, has fixed itself without the nation’s Treasury putting any euro at all. The answers to questions like who ordered him to say this, and what for, when everybody knows and complains about public capital injections in our banks are…
LONDON | We know what The Daily Telegraph did last weekend. On Saturday 22, its daintly designed Business pages brought a report that fitted in two short columns some risk agency quotations and Spanish politicians’ chit-chat about ongoing disagreements as far as the future of the cajas is concerned. “Spain to merge cajas in attempt to calm fears” the headline read, and rightly so. Yet, apparently, this piece of news had had to be tamed on its way into the paper.