Spain 2007-2023, a look to the future

There are moments when it is impossible not to stop and look back. These days I have gone back to 2005 and I have seen the European United Kingdom where many young Spaniards went to study or start working. The disastrous miscalculation of David Cameron He brought the brexit. This summer I will return there, passport in hand and with the pound at 1.12 euros. How well a recent European graduate would have lived with that kind of change! But what it shows us today is the crossroads the British have gotten themselves into.

Jump to 2007. Already in Madrid. It was hot when the newsroom started talking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Two firms entangled in a Chinese-sounding mortgage business called subprime.

There was stock market fear, but it sounded far away, on Wall Street. In Spain, the Ibex 35 was on its way to approaching 16,000 points. In November it would mark its historical maximum. Car dealerships sold like there was no tomorrow, finance companies lent easily, houses were built, mortgages… And everyone was happy. The public accounts were in surplus.

16 years have passed and the Ibex has not dreamed of those levels again. It closed last Friday at 9,333 points. We are waiting to know the data for the closing of the deficit for 2022, but it will be around 4.5% with a public debt that exceeds one and a half billion euros. Talking about a surplus in Spain is already a chimera.

A part of that debt is inherited from the 2012 crisis. And what happened between 2007 and 2012 is well known. In July 2008, the first brick of the mirrored building that reflected that illusion fell and Martinsa-Fadesa went bankrupt. In September, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in the US.

The arrival of the financial crisis was already official, but here we had no reason to worry because we had “the most solid banks in the world”, as he explained to us. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Later we learned that it was not so “solid”, although the time bomb was in the savings banks, those entities managed by politicians that took speculative risk in the real estate sector and which had to be rescued at an economic and social cost of which we have not recovered.

“16 years have passed and the Ibex has not dreamed of those levels again. Talking about a surplus in Spain is already a chimera”

Greece, Ireland, Portugal… Things got worse, the markets attacked and the errors in the architecture of the euro began to trigger the risk premium. Zapatero had to undertake the biggest cut in social spending known to date and signed his death warrant at the polls.

In 2011, Mariano Rajoy he won the elections and achieved a truce in the markets until he went to Brussels to raise the rugs for the public deficit and subjected the presentation of his first Budgets to the calendar of elections in Andalusia in 2012. What came later also sounds familiar to all of us . The risk premium skyrocketed, Bankia had to be rescued, an MoU signed with Brussels to access a line of credit [rescate] and investors led us into the abyss until Mario Draghi He spoke his magic words in the summer of that year.

I remember that at that time, Rosa Diez He was presenting a UPyD report that focused on the extra cost of an ineffective State inflated by the heat of a bubble that had burst five years ago.

It was around then, when a well-known investment banker told me: in Spain we had three crises, one real estate, another financial and another political. The first two are on their way to being resolved. The third no.

Of those powders, these muds. In 2023, we Spaniards will reap the fruit of the seeds that the new policy that came later has contributed to watering.

We can start with Barcelona, ​​where the MWC starts next week. In 2008, I had to cover my first Mobile in a cosmopolitan city that aspired to be a technological benchmark in the Mediterranean. 2012 arrived, with cuts in Arthur Mas and the flight forward with the independence movement to cover up management errors and corruption… Next week when this fair opens, the newspapers will be waiting to see if there is a greeting to Philip VI in a Catalonia that has been surpassed by Madrid in terms of GDP. Taxi drivers will thank heaven that the MWC has survived the disasters of There is Colau.

The harsh consequences of the financial crisis paved the way for awareness of inequality. A movement born in the streets, the 15-M has come to power. Now a socialist president, Pedro Sanchezwho voted for Zapatero’s cuts as a deputy and lived closely the disaster of the savings banks speaks to us about ‘those with the cigar’.

Your government approves taxes on large energy companies and banks as patches in search of more collection. And the courts will rule on those patches. Until they do so, we Spaniards will not know if these tax revenues are real or will have to be returned in a few years.

[Opinión: Del ‘solo sí es sí’ a los defectos jurídicos de los impuestos]

Meanwhile, in the employer’s association the mess of the salary of Antonio Garamendi and fertilizes the field to continue discrediting businessmen. The CEOE also makes -and has made- mistakes. The legacy of its former president, Gerardo Diaz -condemned for money laundering- filled the watering can with which Ione Herb he now messes with other honest and successful businessmen.

“I wonder how much Gerardo Cuerva (Cepyme) and Lorenzo Amor (ATA) earn”

Does Garamendi earn a lot or a little? Well, the CEOE is a private organization and if it considers it appropriate it can pay a salary of 380,000 euros to its president. Now, in the employers’ association, not only is the Ibex 35 represented, led by presidents who compete in the salary league of the Champions League world. There are also the self-employed, SMEs and micro-SMEs. And for the vast majority of those companies that salary is probably not adequate. I wonder how much they charge gerardo cuerva (cepyme) and Lawrence Love (ATA).

We get lost in the morbidity of the details, but the cool thing is that if things had been done right, taking advantage of the monetary stimulus from the ECB in the last 10 years, the CEOE would today represent many more companies led by a CEO. Medium and large companies where the SMI is practically not charged. With a more productive and competitive economic engine, perhaps today we would talk about other things.

And it is that what has happened in these years with monetary policy is also to make them look at it. You will remember that at the gates of the 2008 recession, the ECB of Jean-Claude Trichet decided to raise interest rates. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve lowered them to help the economy.

[Y Trichet subió los tipos en plena crisis: 10 años del mayor en la historia del BCE]

Years later, before the damage caused to the countries of the South by their own central bank, redemption came with Draghi. But she was her successor, Christine Lagardewho propped up the monetary drunkenness with which first Mariano Rajoy and later and already in an exaggerated way, Pedro Sánchez, have financed his political agenda.

Now we have to fight an inflation that impoverishes us all -or places us in front of the mirror: we thought we were rich because we were swimming in a monetized public debt-. And Lagarde says that she is determined to do it, but the markets do not buy it. Once again of those dusts, these muds.

This week a delegation from the European Parliament will visit to try to figure out what the money from European funds is being spent on. It is actually good news that policy makers are being asked to give clear accountability for taxpayer money.

The men in black return -although they never completely left-, but dressed in white and commanded by a woman, Monika Hohlmeier. The lines of credit that in 2012 were called bailouts are now European funds. It is true that half is “solidarity” money that arrives in Spain on a non-refundable basis. But there are another 70,000 million that will have to be returned.

“The men in black return -although they never completely left-, but dressed in white and commanded by a woman”

In these 16 years, we have made some progress, in more Europe. The euro has not been -for the moment- in question again, we have an (incomplete) banking union and the big decisions about Spain are made in Brussels. But next Friday will also mark one year since a war has been waged in Europe over the invasion of Ukraine. And another difficult winter is coming in which -in economic terms- instead of talking about lines of credit we will talk about gas shipments.

[Opinión: El BCE teme una subida del gas que fuerce a subir más los tipos]

In this review, I have not yet mentioned the pandemic and I will do so linked to the awareness of the problem of reconciliation that has occurred at this time. On March 8, 2018, a transversal march filled the streets of many Spanish cities for feminism. That image has become politicized and this year, the bungling of the ‘law of only yes is yes’ is what will mark a divided agenda.

In Covid-19 there was aid for almost everything, except for families. Later, PWC verified that the situation of women in the world of work took the worst part. Apart from the pandemic, measures have been implemented, such as the equalization of parental leave to advance what we call ‘co-responsibility’. But the Ministry of Equality is too busy with other tasks to rigorously analyze the data and see if equal opportunities between men and women in the face of the gap that opens up with motherhood is on the right track in a country where there are fewer and fewer children.

Nothing that happens today in Spain is coincidence. And in the last almost four years, I have been telling it in this column. Right now, I have to press the button pause. It is true that this year many things will happen. In a while, I could turn the power back on play. But I’m already telling you that I’m afraid it will be with a already seen. Until then, good luck to all.

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