LONDON | Already in the mood to dismiss 2012 as a lost year for the UK economy? Analysts in the City of London waived as a non-event the preliminary GDP estimate of this year’s first quarter, released Wednesday by the office of national statistics, which showed that the British economy had contracted by -0.2%. The negative figure added up to a -0.3% fall in the economy in the final three months…
International Financial Analysts Afi brought to our attention this chart from 2011 financial accounts in Spain, which confirm that ratio of gross debt (loans and different security prices) of households and businesses in Spain has dropped by 13.5 percentage points of GDP. The figure is now 216pc, down from the maximum levels reached during the second quarter in 2010. It also reflects the downturn in indebtedness operations during last year,…
Spain feels overwhelmed, to say the least, about the fact that it is these days referred to in countless headlines, euro zone leaders’ comments and foreign market participant analyses. The view from Madrid is that those portraits do not always mix the most accurate data with the intention of extracting a sentenced-to-bailout picture, in most cases. Of course, this is a biased impression, although the Spanish government and the financial industry…
LONDON | UK growth behaviour turned up worse figures than expected for the final three months of 2011. The Office for National Statistics published Wednesday its revised estimate for gross domestic production growth for last year’s final quarter, showing that the economy contracted by more than previously calculated. Q4 GDP was cut from -0.2% to -0.3%, with most of the downward update being made to household and government expenditure, while the contribution…
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | Wall Street has been weighed down by a worse than expected purchasing managers index of manufacturing sectors or manufacturing ISM (Dow Jones: +0,33%; S&P 500: +0,33%; Nasdaq: +0,39%), which has disappointed both in its final reading and in its composition. Furthermore, the weak data of personal earnings and expenses in American families cast doubts regarding 1Q12 consumption. In fact, experts at Barclays point out: “we…