By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | The new deficit targets established by Brussels left unmoved the Spanish Treasury issuance performance. It has placed €3,009.29 million in bonds and debentures at lower interests, few days after the Spanish government set up a higher deficit target for 201 and after Brussels mended it to a final 5.3% [...]
All posts by thecorner.eu team
Bidders welcome Madrid’s push for privatisation of water services
MADRID | Privatisation of Canal de Isabel II, the company that manages water services in the autonomous region of Madrid, attracted this week one more potential investor. Insurance firm Mutua Madrileña has expressed its intention to officially bid for the water company. The insurer, chaired by Ignacio Garralda, has confided in Mediobanca to advise on the operation. Esperanza [...]
Madrid’s financial City doubts the Spanish risk premium can fall below 300bp
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | Even though the Spanish risk premium on Wednesday morning dropped to 328 basis points, financial analysts in Madrid are split up about its evolution. 50% of the analysts consulted by Consenso consider reasonable a fall below 300bp before the end of 2012. Most of them clarify that the risk premium [...]
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 [...]
Portugal behaves
By Carlos Díaz Güell, in Madrid | Portugal has gained the confidence of the Troika (staffers from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank), as one could infer after reading the note published at the end of their visit last week to Lisbon for the third quarterly review of the adjustment programme. The group [...]
“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 [...]
The cheek of Mario Draghi with private investors!
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | The Greek restructuring has been a most impressive achievement. But it has fallen only on private investors’ heads. Public bondholders, like the European Central Bank (ECB), refused to take in their share of losses as everyone else did. When the EBC’s governor Mario Draghi was asked about the ECB’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]




