ShareI have been reading press accounts of the GM decision to back out of the Opel/Vauxhall sale to the Magna/Sberbank consortium from various countries. There are a lot of different perspectives on this event in the U.S., Belgium, Spain, Germany, Russia, the U.K and elsewhere, because a lot of players are involved.
The conclusion I [...]

ShareWhen it comes to the housing meltdowns in the richest economies, the US has been matched only by Spain, Ireland and the UK. All four countries have seen spectacular losses of wealth in the housing sector over the last two years.
The response by all four governments was to apply as much stimulus as they reasonably [...]

ShareAccording to the results of a study by the Spanish savings bank Caixa Catalunya, consumption will fall 4.1% this year, making the reaction to this downturn four times as severe as during the last big downturn in 1993.  Back then consumption only fell 0.9%.
The results are not only an indication of the deteriorated employment outlook [...]

ShareSpain has been a laggard in the search for improving economic fundamentals.  The news coming out of Spain has been dreadful from employment to house prices to mortgages and banking. But the first ray of hope appeared yesterday when it was reported that late payments on loans granted by banks, savings banks and cooperatives fell [...]

ShareCitigroup has just released a forecast which is very troubling in regards to employment and growth in the Spanish economy.  With unemployment already having hit 17.9%, Citigroup expects layoffs to increase this to 22% in 2010.  Below is my translation of the Spanish-language article in Finanzas.
The stabilization that the Spanish labour market seems to have [...]

ShareEvery country has a problem child or two in the financial services sector. America has Citigroup and Bank of America. Britain has RBS and HBOS/Lloyds.  And Germany has Hypo Real Estate. 
I have been chronicling problems at the real estate lender on this blog for some time now and last posted on HRE in April [...]

ShareMy translation below is of an article from the website Finanzas.
House prices accelerated their decline in June, down 10.1% over the same month of 2008, which is three tenths more than the previous month, when housing fell 9.8%, according to an Index of Spanish real estate market (IMIE) from Tinsa.
This fall, which is typical at [...]

ShareYou have probably heard the stories about China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) bidding for Repsol YP’F’s Argentine assets in a quest for more natural resources for China. Well, apparently, the Chinese want a lot more than just Argentina; they want the whole of Repsol’s Latin American asset base.
The Chinese have been buying up [...]

ShareThis is a translation of a Spanish-language article from Finanzas.
For UBS, there is no debate about the economy’s green shoots despite the improvement in employment and the slowest fall in consumption and industrial production. In a harsh report on Spain, the Swiss bank says that the worst is yet to come, and that unemployment will [...]

ShareCredit in Spain is contracting at an unprecedented rate, down 33% in the first quarter as Spain faces a housing bust and near 20% unemployment. Below is my translation of part of a Spanish-language article explaining the situation.
Consumer credit fell by 33.7% in the first quarter, to €5.796 billion, and late payments rose to 17.54%, [...]