The final sentence of that article is the root of the problem. As long as people ask their governments to “save them from economic excesses”, then they are destined for lives of poverty. It is that exact process, governments attempting to prevent failure, that causes the failure. History is unequivocal on this point.

Mutual entanglements resulted in the Spanish real estate, construction and banking industries functioning as a single conglomerate and not as arms length participants. Banks and cajas on the hook for big loans to developers and builders in which, in many cases, they had actual equity participation. Control of the property valuation process through industry heavyweight, TINSA, which is in turn owned by the cajas. The escape route for all this is, of course, the lightening of mortgage lending standards to accommodate the innocents who buy, not out of necessity, but as a hedge against prices running away from their incomes in perpetuity or the great mass of Spaniards who think that property ownership, even if achieved through a mortgage, protects them from currency instability.