Mari Pinardo | The financial and stock market situation of the banks has returned to the front page after the Supreme Court decided, re-decided and then postponed its sentence on who ought to pay the stamp duty on mortgages. The decision has caused our banks to lose 9.066 billion euros in stock market capitalisation in a week.
Spain’s banking sector lost € 5.560 Bn in market capitalisation yesterday after the country’s Supreme Court decided they woud have to pay mortgages taxes and not the final client. Just 24 hours after, the Court announced they will review the decision. Morgan Stanley calculates that the effect of ruling could reach 12 billion euros.
Bankinter | We are revising our recommendation for BBVA to Neutral from Buy because of the deterioration of the situation in Turkey.
Spain’s new prime minister Pedro Sanchez is envisaging to increase taxation on banks. Although the project is still in its infancy and needs the support of Parliament, experts at Alphavalue believe the assessment of the impact could be largely watered down.
Miguel Navascués | The high retail interest rates in Spain, over 8% compared to at least 4% in France and other Eurozone countries, without doubt indicates usurious behavior, of the banks’ abuse of power at the expense of the customer, who on the other hand ought to inform and educate himself and refuse to pay these rates. I would say that, in fact, there is an oligopolistic factor in Spanish banking which stamps its slant on the interest rates it charges.
Spain was a well-liked region within European banks until the new government came into place. As Morgan Stanley points in a note to investors, “the negative noise around a potential bank tax and the doubts on the fiscal plans have hit the sector.” Santander will kick off the 2Q18 results season on July 25th with all the eyes on its capital position and headwinds from Latam currencies. Issues like Turkey in BBVA and TSB in Sabadell have provided more downside to some of these names.
BS Markets | Spanish banks’ recourse to Eurosystem financing stood at almost 170 billion euros in May. Second only to Italy’s in Eurozone, whose needs amount to around 250 billion euros. In both cases these volumes represent 15% of GDP and between 6 and 7% of the size of the sector.
Raimundo Poveda | Spanish banks must find somewhere to invest. Their retail credit, for now with a low level bad debts, has been growing at an accelerated rhythm for the last couple of years. But that is where the good news ends. Credit for house purchases, by far the most important component in household credit, and in all private sector credit, continues to fall (2.5% in 2017).
Ofelia Marín-Lozano | The Spanish financial sector has made an unprecedented effort to sanitise its books: since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, sanitising and provisions (amounting to some 260 billion euros) have reduced profit margins by two thirds, according to figures from the latest annual meeting of the financial sector. The role of digitilisation replacing branches was one of the recurrent themes of the meeting.
Adjustments to the number of employees and branches in the sector continue, despite the fact that the deleveraging of the private sector seems to be coming to an end. Spanish banks are feeling the effects of the resolution and sale of Banco Popular in June 2017 and posted after-tax losses of €3.92 billion for the year, although it achieved further improvements in solvency and asset quality.