By Pablo M. Simón and Inés Abril, in Madrid | Panic is gathering momentum, and money is flying away from Spain into other countries of the euro zone. The latest data from the national balance of payments show the fastest flight of capital so far, even higher than that after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The bad new is that the spiral of fear that affects investors is causing uncontrolled reactions:…
By Nuño Rodrigo | www.cincodias.com | It is remarkable the swiftness with which the markets have amortised the bailout plan for the Spanish banking sector. But it is no surprise; the markets have their own stimulus, reward and learning mechanisms, and when an event appears repeatedly, the process rolls out ever quicker. The Greek bailout anaesthetised the markets for some months; the Irish did the same for some weeks; the…
Helga Jung is the first woman to enter the board of Allianz, the largest insurance pool in the world, in the center of German finance. The group became Allianz Societas Europaea (SE) in 2006. With more than 78 million customers, 142,000 employees and a global presence in 70 countries, Allianz obtained an operating income of €7.9 billion in 2011. Its assets under third parties management are of €1.281 billion. What risks…
MADRID | elconfidencial.com | The rescue operation of the Spanish banks is rather a foreign banks' bailout, the online daily El Confidencial reported Tuesday. Check the International Monetary Fund's recent study on Spanish banks and a graph shows up with an eloquent figure. The exposure of foreign banks to Spain is moving towards a colossal number: €1.2 trillion. What is surprising is not just the sheer volume of it but also its…
LONDON | Germany finally met its match in Spain. And the outcome of the clash, as for Monday's market reaction, was unsurprisingly ugly, leaving the future of the euro project in deeper waters than ever before. Naysayers are meant to have a hard time running against the tide of general opinion, or so they were portrayed in the now past European political modern tradition. They were the protesters, the champions…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | The European common currency has become poisonous for almost everyone else but Germany. Check below a chart coming from the International Monetary Fund, which shows that not even other core euro economies (that is France) have been able to profit as much as Germany. It also renders perfectly understandable why Nicolas Sarkozy lost the general elections and why he did so amid angry voters….
how to get your ex girlfriend back in a month LONDON | In came this week the numbers of German industrial production, and those who stir up the threat of an approaching euro area-wide recession saw its arguments confirmed: from March to April, Germany registered a 2.2 percent decline, a whole 1.2 percent under market expectations. The figure, 2.2 percent from 2.8 percent in March, placed that month's industrial production…
MADRID | All of the sudden, the feeling things might be spinning out of control has cast a gloomy mood in Spain. For a country lavishly living on others savings, finding itself short of cash has come as a shock-horror revelation. It now faces the unsparing rigour of lying in the hands of fickle and merciless markets. The deep-rooted assumption that confidence gap would be bridged as soon as the…
By Julia Pastor, in Madrid | The solution proposed by the Spanish president Mariano Rajoy to inject capital directly into troubled entities, with no need of intervening the whole of the countries' economy is gaining momentum. It was the International Monetary Fund the first organisation which gave a boost to the idea when its managing director, Christine Lagarde, assured that Spain did not require a rescue. Last week, Mario Draghi’s…
WASHINGTON | “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin, it does not work,” had already said Allan Meltzer in 1969. Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University teacher and author of the monumental History of the Federal Reserve is the same conservative who advised John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Under Clinton's presidency he was in charge of a U.S. Congress committee that essentially claimed the end of the World Bank on the basis…