Spanish Banks: After
all the money that's been stuffed into them and all the reforms and
mergers of the last 7 or 8 years, these are surely as safe as houses
now. Well, No, says Don Quijones: The last five years have been a
bumper period for banking scams and scandals in crisis-ridden Spain.
From Bankia’s doomed IPO in 2012 to the “mis-selling” of
complex preferentes shares to “unsophisticated” retail bank
customers, including children and Alzheimers sufferers, all of the
scandals have had one thing in common: the banks have consistently
and ruthlessly sacrificed the welfare and wealth of customers,
investors, and taxpayers on the altar of short-term survival. Some
commentators claim that the problem of banking instability in Spain
has been put to rest in recent times, thanks chiefly to a robust,
debt-fueled recovery, a tepid resurgence of the real estate sector
and the transfer of the most toxic assets from banks’ balance
sheets to the festering balance sheets of the nation’s bad bank,
Sareb. They could not be more wrong. Despite the untold billions of
euros of public funds lavished on “cleaning up” their balance
sheets and the roughly €240 billion of provisions booked against
bad debt since December 2007, the banks are just as weak and
disaster-prone as they were four years ago. More here. Perhaps I should shift my account from Banco Popular/Pastor, despite the charms of the (ex-Citibank) ladies who deal with me.
Canine Crap in Spain:
Fed up with the piles of this stuff on its streets, the Madrid-region
town of Torrelodones has placed a huge model turd in its main square,
in an attempt to shame its residents into picking up the poop. This
might just have worked, if some shit hadn't stolen the . . shit.
Which reminds me . . .
The Brexit: Not long to
go now and the politicians in both London and Brussels - not to
mention other capitals around the world – will have donned their brown
trousers. For the latest polls show the Outers having a significant
lead over the Inners. One of my favourite columnists Ambrose Evans Pritchard – about whose views on this issue I've been a bit
confused for a while – has finally come out in favour of a
Brexit. Read his pungent comments here. And the inevitable fulsome
endorsement of (most of) his column by Richard North of Flexit here.
I've been against the EU project for decades now, so am not terribly
surprised by this development. As Ambrose puts it: Stripped of
distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to
restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue
living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European
Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the
British people can never remove, even when it persists in error. For
some of us it has nothing to do with payments into the EU budget.
Whatever the sum, it is economically trivial.
Spain and the Brexit:
Spain's Foreign Minister – known to me as Motormouth Margallo –
has never missed an opportunity – especially ahead of elections –
to play to the far-right gallery over Gibraltar. His latest
contribution to the healing of this running sore is to threaten that
Gibraltar will be excluded from the EU market after a Brexit and so
should think again about its almost 100% rejection, a couple of years
ago, of shared sovereignty. Fat chance, I would have thought. At
least as long as the despised Margallo is heading the Spanish team.
Football Hooliganism:
This is despicable, of course, but at least some of the Brits have
been arrested both in France and the UK. Strangely, no Russians have
been arrested, even though there was a vicious attack on England
supporters in the stadium after the game. And various reported
ambushes of English fans on the streets of Marseilles. Moscow's RT TV
did report the violence but with no mention of these attacks and no
video of a brain-damaged Brit having his head stamped on by a
Russian thug. But this is not terribly surprising. Especially when a
Russian MP is reported to have encouraged repeat attacks when paths
again cross in Lille this week.
Finally . . . My
walking companion of last week has nicely reminded me of one
low-light for me, when one of 3 old dears I was chatting to in a
village just before Comillas put my age at 10 years above what it is - because my hair was silver["White, dad"]. The oldest lady then tried to
smooth my ruffled feathers by suggesting I was 5 years younger than my
age. But the damage to my ego had been done by then.
I saw this list of, I think, Pope Frankie's philosophy on a church wall in Villaviciosa. You don't have to be a Catholic, or even a theist, to agree with it, of course:
Well, apart from the last one. Which adds nothing to the humanist prescriptions.
And I guess Frankie and I might well disagree on who's in the wrong on some things. Him, for example. Though I'm sure we'd remain friends notwithstanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment