Fernando del Pino Calvo-Sotelo, in Madrid | Through the years, central, regional and local politicians have created, out of the blue, hundreds of thousands of laws, rules and regulations with which we all are obliged to comply. As far as I know, the Official State Gazette publishes 250.000 pages a year; the regional ones, 800.000 a year. You read it right: no typo there. One million pages a year. Maybe in…
MADRID | Spain’s minister of Economy Luis de Guindos suggested, almost announced, without giving away much detail immediate reforms in health care and public education to adjust the final accounts of the State. The new austerity measures are meant to touch the very nerve in public spending since both departments sum up to one third of total government spending, apart from the pension system that belongs to another cash register. The…
MADRID | Governments become arrogant over time and the more arrogantly they behave, the worse they do their job. Indeed, arrogance is usually a bad influence, as it leads to confusion and errors. Former president of Catalonia and an old hand in Spanish politics, Jordi Pujol, in his latest memoirs wrote of former Spain’s presidents that José María Aznar’s political ambition dwindled away because of his pride and Rodríguez Zapatero’s did so…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | John Authers, in Trends That Don’t Seem to Make Sense, have some pertinent questions to share. The one that has attracted my attention is: Why is the euro still so strong when at all other times a currency with so many risks would be certain to weaken? Resilience of the euro is startling and damaging. The eurozone’s crisis has been driven by balance of payments problems…
MADRID | Spain seems crippled by mounting economic woes. It faces a steep rise in risk premium fuelled by plunging confidence on its ability to reverse the bleak outlook ahead. Recession takes its toll in terms of higher unemployment, budgetary deviations and extensive deterioration in the banking sector. Reforms undertaken so far have failed to deliver any tangible benefit. Labour market overhaul has only helped to accelerate lay-offs, with no impact…
NEW YORK | It’s been a bad day for Spain in Wall Street’s most read media. The tepid bond auction is to blame: Spain sold a total of $3.43 billion in bonds with maturities between 2015 and 2020, near the bottom of its target volume. Spain expected to sell between $3,28 billion and a planned maximum of $4,6 billion. There was a weaker demand and therefore it had to pay…
FRANKFORT | That is the view from Berlin: the biggest problem Germany contends with is Europe. And this is so particularly because of this fact, more than 17 million people are unemployed in the euro zone. But while in Austria the unemployment rises to 4.2% and 5.7% in Germany, the Spanish labour market suffers the tragedy of jobless figures that come to 23.6%. And there is no prospect of improvement. The problem is…
MADRID | A calm breeze in the midst of so much economic shock and just-about-fine Spanish bond auctions, whose effects will probably still ripple beyond Easter with the usual euro contagion talk. Let us pause for a moment and read a list of the happiest and satisfied peoples in the world. It is a huge report, a pile of 158 pages full of charts, notes in fine print and details on…
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | Manuel Sousa Andrade is head of investment services and trading at Saxo Bank. Sousa proposes that if we want to get out of the current crisis, it’s necessary to get rid of the wrongs of the past and to change investors’ habits. Regarding the public debt, you say that investors want to ‘protect themselves’ and that’s why they ask for ever higher yields. Can…
MADRID | Afi analysts drew today investors’ attention to the widening divergence between the manufacturing cycle of the European Monetary Union and other economic blocs. PMI figures of the manufacturing sector fell again in the euro zone’s aggregate indicator, slipping into activity contraction levels. Apart from China’s, the rest of PMI numbers are either consolidated or approach the expansion area. At Afi, experts forecast a EMU GDP downward correction of 0.1pc…