Business News & Financial News

Spanish economy 4th May 2026

First-quarter growth slows to 0.6%

According to the preliminary estimate released by the National Statistics Institute (INE), Spain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by 0.6% in Q1 2026 compared to the previous quarter. This rate was two-tenths of a percentage point lower than that recorded in Q4 2025. In Q1 2026, domestic demand contributed 0.4 percentage points to the quarter-on-quarter GDP growth, while external demand contributed 0.2 points. Breakdown by Demand Aggregates Household final consumption…

European economy, In Europe 4th May 2026

ECB keeps rates at 2% and acknowledges risks “have intensified”

CdM | The European Central Bank (ECB) has kept interest rates at 2% and acknowledges that “upside risks to inflation and downside risks to growth have intensified”. However, it states that “the Governing Council remains well positioned to deal with the current uncertainty”. As stated in the press release following the April meeting, the eurozone entered this period of sharp rises in energy prices with inflation close to the 2%…

In the World 4th May 2026

OPEC+ to increase production in June by 188,000 bpd from additional voluntary cut announced in April 2023

Link Securities | The seven countries of the OPEC+ alliance, which had previously announced voluntary oil production cuts in April and November 2023, namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman, held a meeting yesterday, Sunday, to review global market conditions and their outlook. In their collective commitment to supporting market stability, the seven participating countries decided to implement a production increase of 188,000 barrels per day from…

“We need to approach negotiations with the U.S. on terms that are completely different from those currently being proposed”

Says Antonio Bonet, president of the Club of Spanish Exporters and Investors. He points out that “Europe has a single tariff applied by all member states, but the U.S. applies a tariff to each country, meaning it can decide that the tariff applied to Spanish black olives is higher than that for Italian olives, as it did at one point. So there is a part of the negotiation between Europe…

“Fifteen years ago, the European economy was larger than that of the U.S. Today, the U.S. economy is one and a half times that of Europe”

“It is a shame that we are able to mobilize economic resources for large-scale projects abroad, but not in our Spanish market”

In an interview with Consejeros magazine, Sacyr’s coordinating advisor, Elena Jiménez de Andrade, explains that now “We have great capacity to win projects, a capacity that until now contrasted with a series of financial limitations and balance sheet size. However, in this strategic cycle, we are going to eliminate those barriers. That is why we have set an ambitious goal for 2033: to triple the value of our assets. We…

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