We are starting to get a sense of who the winners and losers of the Great Unraveling are. Spain is definitely a loser.
Just think, a few years ago Spain was the envy of Western Europe with a dynamic and booming property market and prodigious GDP growth. The country was THE holiday-maker’s paradise, with many buying [...]

We should consider Spain one of the four original bubble markets where residential property markets soared to ridiculous levels during the housing bubble.  The bubble has now popped and those countries, the U.K., the U.S., Ireland and Spain, are reeling.  To be sure, there were bubbles in other markets as well. However, these four markets [...]

Spain is one of the original four bubble economies to implode.  This group includes the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland.  Unfortunately for the Spanish, in the wake of their property crash, things in Spain are looking particularly bleak with unemployment rising, GDP plummeting, and banks like Caja Castilla-La Mancha and property developers like Martinsa Fadesa and Drac [...]

This comes via Edward Hugh at “A Fistful of Euros“:
The governing council of the Bank of Spain has taken the decision to intervene in the operation of the Caja after carrying out an analysis of its financial position, thus taking as read that the negotiations which might have lead to its merger with the Andalucian [...]

As recession takes hold, European citizens are starting to ask questions about how they were led into this, the deepest downturn in three-quarters of a century. The leading Spanish daily El Pais published a very thoughtful article today asking how things had unravelled so quickly and so spectacularly in Spain, previously one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.

These are the same questions that one must ask in the United States, Britain and Ireland regarding their own property bubbles. And, in view of recent turmoil in astern Europe, I suspect similar answers will be sought there as well.

This first part in a series of articles lays out the statistics of bubble and bust, demonstrating the scale of the bubble in Spain and it also makes a number of suggestion as to how to prevent a recurrence. You should note that this article points out Spain’s helplessness due to its lack of control over interest rates as a key impediment to solving the problem. Below is my translation of the article:

Niels Jensen from Absolute Return Partners based in London sent me the following insightful analysis regarding the Euro, the possibility of Eurozone default, the possibility of a Eurozone bust-up and all things European. As Niels is snowed in under 8 inches of snow in wintery London, he obviously has had the opportunity to craft a piece of brilliance.

FT Alphaville is reporting that Martinsa Fadesa, the bankrupt Spanish property developer, has seen the value of its drop 30% this year alone. Spain has largely slipped from view as the credit crisis has reached global dimensions. However, it bears remembering that Spain, along with the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland have been at the forefront of residential property price falls.

Below are links to a few posts on the web that I found particularly good. For more posts and news, see the news feed.

Spanish banking giant Banco Santander has pulled through the credit crisis with a much higher profile than ever before. I was initially skeptical that the firm was hiding huge losses at it had exposure in Spain, the UK and the US, all terrible bubble markets. Yet, it has seemed to come through swimmingly [...]

In July, I made my ten predictions for the markets and global economy for the rest of the year. Some of my predictions were pretty pedestrians, and some were fairly bold. Let’s take a look and see how I’m doing.
Here’s what I originally said:

Oil prices will dip below $100 before year-end. Let’s [...]