MADRID | The severe crisis in Europe and especially in Spain, Italy and Portugal has attracted some of the main actors of the private equity scene. According to Capital Madrid, one of the biggest firms in the sector, Apax Partners, has put its focus on the financial assets accumulated by the Spanish banks and that will shortly be going out for sale. Indeed, the difficult time many Spanish banks go through…
The Purchasing Managers Index provides one of the most reliable hints about a country’s GDP behaviour, so isn’t difficult to agree with all observers that April’s relapse in PMI figures in the euro zone spell loss of momentum in industrial activity. The data are at the lowest level since mid-2009. With no signs of acceleration of the indicators of activity and with early sentiment indexes’ falling in the second quarter of 2012, the risk of the…
By Carlos Díaz Guell, in Madrid | In Spain, households’ financial assets fell by 3.5% in 2011 due to a downturn in acquisition activity and especially market declines recorded in the third quarter of last year after the deterioration of the sovereign crisis. This is compounded by the collapse of housing prices, which caused housing sector wealth to fall by 6.6% dragging total net wealth down 51 percentage points of GDP. In 2011 it also was reported a change in the composition of household savings with a fall not seen…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | Please, bear with me. First, I took a graph from the Noah Smith’s blog, in which everyone can see that venture capital has almost passed away since the 2000 crisis. The chart shows the value of equity shares, and each line is a selection made under a different approach. The 1990’s were the golden age of risk, people loved risk and the VC funding…
By LaCaixa Research Team, in Barcelona | In the years prior to the recession that started in the last decade, in many countries the gradually increasing debt of the private sector allowed for much more intensive economic growth than would have been seen without it. The abrupt appearance of the crisis frustrated this expansion and revealed an excessive level of debt. This debt is now a heavy burden that can counteract…
International Financial Analysts AFI in Madrid added their opinion in agreement with more or less everyone else: the mix of relaxed monetary policy, fiscal retrenchment and depreciation of the sterling pound that has been engineered in Downing Street by the Coalition government isn’t working. In fact, AFI said the UK’s is the economy with the weakest recovery response against the crisis among the main developed economies. As the Bank of…
NEW YORK | A big amount of pain in the Spanish economy could have been avoided. But the Germany authorities chose not to. This is pretty much the line of thought that The New York Times has been sharing with its public for months. So far, the excessive “German-led mismanagement of the euro-zone crisis” has been the focus of as many op-eds as the war in Afghanistan or the US healthcare…
MADRID | According to Alberto Vigil, analyst at Barclays in Madrid, the peripheral euro risk and particularly Spain’s has been exaggerated by the markets, which would be discounting an economic situation perceived as poor and with a very limited range of choices. Yet, Vigil maintained an optimistic opinion and said investors will reconsider their position when reviewing the strengths of the country. “Spain could have done its reforms much better, but…
Many economists and the Anglo-Saxon financial gurus have been killing the euro month after month since early 2010. But, even if their doomsday predictions have miserably failed so far, their negative influence over the markets can not be neglected. By Fernando Barciela, in Madrid | PART 3 | Some banks, especially in the UK, were not far behind the panic wave and at that time announced that they had intensified their contingency plans before the more than probable failure of the euro. After…
Many economists and the Anglo-Saxon financial gurus have been killing the euro month after month since early 2010. But, even if their doomsday predictions have miserably failed so far, their negative influence over the markets can not be neglected. By Fernando Barciela, in Madrid | PART 2 | Euro mayhem? The fall of Brussels? Russian domination? German isolation? An article like this has already been published by a serious magazine, The American Spectator, supposedly devoted to calm, profound analysis. Flipping through the pages of Fortune,…