A curated selection of links we hope can enlighten us all; some come from our corner, some do from other corners of the net. And as always, our comment widgets are anxious to get your suggestions. UK, could you just cut the banker-pay drama and legislate like Spain? New York sues banks that used electronic system for fraud over mortgages Is insider-trading crackdown the cause of hedge fund’s poor results? Why…
MADRID | Since December, the Spanish Treasury has had a series of successive successes in its debt offers, even exceeding their expectations in many of them. On Thursday, it happened again. The agency under the ministry of Economy and Competitiveness placed €4,560 million in bonds, the maximum planned, at more moderate rates than on the previous occasion according to data released by the Bank of Spain. Specifically, the Treasury placed…
By Julia Pastor, in Madrid | The eventual coming out of green shoots within the dark scenery outlined by the world economy is well worth a mention. The analysts at the City of Madrid emphasise three good macroeconomic figures. Particularly, Santander refers in their analysis to Europe’s PMIs, which even in recessive zone at 48.8, compared to previous 46.9 of December, are standing at their highest mark in the last five…
By Luis Garicano, in London | NADA ES GRATIS (fedeablogs.net). A very brief and worrying observation that the media does not seem to have noticed: the IMF forecast of which the press this week has been constantly talking about and that predicts a decrease in the Spanish GDP of 1.7% does not include an additional fiscal adjustment due to the deviation of the 2011 deficit. That is to say, if the deficit…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | The FT has published a very good article by John Authers on the unusual business practice that American companies maintain with their shareholders. As Authers says, at present, non-financial companies possess a cash cushion of 6% of their total assets, something that has never been witnessed in the last six decades. The companies, with large profits (profits have risen to their highest level since the…
By Julia Pastor in Madrid, and Ana Fuentes in New York | El País. The Spanish minister of Economy, Luis de Guindo, assured the World Economic Forum at Davos that Spain will set the structural deficit at 0% for the whole of the country’s regional governments from year 2020 on, despite Brussels does let the states fix it at 0,5% “There is a need to send a signal to the markets,” said the minister during…
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | “Greece must make up its mind”, warns the federal minister of Finance in Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble, from an interview for The Wall Street Journal. Schäuble states that the euro zone could refuse to grant Greece a new bailout and, if it did so, it would be pushing the Greeks to a default. Schäuble has decided to demand the permanent presence of a EU Commissioner…
[UPDATE] By Julia Pastor, in MADRID | The Spanish president Mariano Rajoy visited Berlin on Thursday. It was his first official meeting with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel since he was sworn in as president. Against the backdrop of the next January 31 European summit, it was expected that Rajoy would propose Merkel to relax Spain’s deficit ceiling for 2012 and 2013, considering the appreciable cutting of IMF’s growth perspectives for…
