Spain

Interviews 14th March 2012

More Anglo-Saxon bankers should go to jail, says OECD’s William White

MADRID | Former colleagues at the Bank of England will read with some sense of shock what William White told the Spanish financial newspaper Expansión during an interview with one of its editors, Miquel Roig. Or perhaps not. After all, as Roig points out in today’s edition, “‘Central bankers are a strong brotherhood of mutual admiration,’ former ECB president Jean Claude Trichet used to say. William White was the one who dared…

Spanish economy 13th March 2012

“Stake prices in Spanish companies have dropped from 6 to 9 times ebitda”

By Fernando Rodríguez, in Madrid | Maite Ballester is president at the Spanish Venture Capital Association ASCRI, which is a non profit entity born in 1986 to develop and promote temporal investment in private companies. She also is managing director at 3i. In what way will Spain’s venture capital sector be affected by the financial system reform and more stringent rules on bank capital reserves? In the short term, these two factors will mean less…

Spanish economy 12th March 2012

Don’t blame Spain’s public sector payroll: it’s 6pc smaller than the EU average

Catalan economist Vicenç Navarro delivers view points whose argument sounds completely contrarian at this stage. While austerity may be debated over –at which degree should it be imposed and how quickly, so further spikes in sovereign debt can be avoided?–, the consensus bears little doubt: public investment must be dramatically lowered. It is the right medicine. But confronted with an increasingly stalled productivity and a disquieting unemployment rate, those of…

aggregation line 12th March 2012

What the City of London reads is the Telegraph, not the FT!

A shocking fact, from the revolving door here at thecorner.eu via Spain’s business paper Expansión, and a worth-noting point for readers tired of stereotypes: former Financial Times correspondent in Madrid Tom Burns has news for the pink’un-obsessed continental Europeans. What’s the dead-tree media brand of preference in the City of London? Not that one. Burns says City types love the finance pages of The Daily Telegraph, instead. “[In Europe] those in…

World economy 12th March 2012

Monday’s US charts (especially) for Spain’s labour union leaders

By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | While some Spanish labour union leaders attend press conferences dressed up in expensive Rolex watches, employment numbers increase somewhere else: in the US, as this graphics show and economist Tim Duy explains in his post. Hiring activity in the US raises 245,000 new jobs since last December. It always is inconvenient and very imperfect to compare different national labour markets and I know better. Yet,…

Spanish economy 12th March 2012

Worrying facts about the Spanish deficit

By Juan Pedro Marín Arrese, in Madrid | The way the data on the Spanish deficit snowballed from 6% in mid-December to 8% a few weeks later and to 8.51% now, has led many to raise their eyebrows in utter disbelief. Even allowing for some benign neglect shown by the out coming government, such a huge deviation adds little credit to budgetary figures outside central administration boundaries. It not only proves…

In Europe 9th March 2012

Mário Soares: Portugal and Spain must tell Mrs Merkel enough is enough

The Latin Bloc may be awakening, after all. The least it could be said about the Spanish government’s decision of bending the public deficit target bar Brussels and Berlin intend to impose, from a harsh 4.4pc to a softer 5.8pc, is that president Mariano Rajoy has enlivened with his move the not-just-austerity talk and the perhaps-Germany-is-wrong debate. In the Friday edition of the Spanish daily El País, former president and…

In Europe 9th March 2012

Nordkapp’s Pablo Díez: “devaluation would be swift, austerity is slow and painful”

By Julia Pastor and Tania Suarez, in Madrid | Pablo Díez, at Nordkapp’s asset management department argues that implementation of austerity as the only measure to sort the crisis out will bring social chaos in Europe. Yet, Díez is unsure about how right Spain’s president Mariano Rajoy is in rejecting the deficit target of 4.4% this year. Do you think it would have been ‘suicidal’ to commit Spain to Brussels’…

Companies 8th March 2012

Valencia-based little giant Mercadona makes a 19pc-net profit jump

Spain’s largest supermarket chain increased its turnover in 2011 to €17.831 billion, 8% up from 2010’s figures. The company, whose headquarters are in Valencia, brought some Mediterranean sun over the Spanish economy when it released this week its 2011 results. Mercadona’s productivity growth rate was 2%, earning a profit after tax of €474 million or 19% more than in 2010. Also, the supermarket has created 6,500 new permanent jobs in 2011,…

Spanish economy 7th March 2012

Internal devaluation in Spain and unemployment

By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | I give you today a couple of graphics, which measure how the process of internal devaluation is going in that peripheral crown, Spain. First, the industry labour costs (wages, red line) and producer prices. Then, industrial production. Everything in annual variations. As readers can see, the boom years were not quite as buoyant in terms of industrial production. Meanwhile, wages were well above the prices, at 4%, trimming production margins. It is a reflection of the brick-and-morter boom, which revitalised wages and sturdy houses…

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