Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

The Spanish Ministress of the Economy gave a robust response to EU forecasts for Spain’s economy which are considerably worse than those of the government itself. “We are working hard to deal with the crisis.” she said, adding “I hope the figures from Brussels will prove to be wrong.” My confidence soared.

I wrote a while ago that Spain’s banks were now the country’s largest estate agent/realtor. Naturally, they’ve been offloading properties not much above the value of the loans on them. Which has not shown much solidarity with the real developers and estate agents, in whom the banks probably have investments. The said developers and agents have been screaming about how unfair this is, forcing them to reduce prices to unprofitable levels. It’s hard to be sympathetic when you know just how much they were making in the good times and you read that the owner of one major company paid himself more than 3 million euros last year as the ship went down with all hands.

The Spanish and Rumanian governments have signed some sort of deal under which out-of-work citizens of the latter will be helped to go back home. The Rumanian minister did try to explain to his Spanish counterpart the maths of unemployment pay here being six times the Rumanian average wage but, nonetheless, we’re now expected to believe there’ll be a rapid exodus of surplus Rumanians. Passed by pigs flying the other way.

“When it comes to seeking subsidies, it’s perfectly normally to certify a project has been completed, even if it has barely started,” said some local official here recently. Well, I dare say that in Continental Europe – especially in the eurozone – it probably is. But I imagine there are quite a few other countries where it isn’t. Possibly even some in the Third World.

Finally . . . Thinking about the opening paragraph of this post – the Spanish verb ‘esperar’ is ambiguous. Perhaps she meant ‘expect’ rather than ‘hope’. Either way, though, she’s surely in cloud-cuckoo land.

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