Sharing from "El País": When Spaniards were the Refugees

When Spaniards were the refugees

The Syrian migrant crisis is drawing comparisons with the exodus during Spain’s Civil War

The article here.

"Little Nicolás" is making the news

It is not the Goscinny/Sempé character but a megalomaniac young Spaniard. More information from El País in English here.

Spanish stamps for letters to Europe

An effective way of marketing dated classic Spanish cinema abroad?

Why Spain is top for Erasmus

An article from El País here.

The NY Times on Spain's home evictions

A harsh reality that has already led people to suicide in crisis-ridden Spain, taken up by The New York Times here.

Spain making (negative) headlines again

Today on the title pages of the online editions of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. Not really encouraging - but that is what we have been watching on TV news for quite a while now... While its football teams and national team are world class, the economy is going from one downgrade to the next - one of the founders of FC Barcelona was a Swiss immigrant (Johann Gamper); he could have brought other skills too...

The FT focuses on Spain again

The Financial Times ("Spain, not Greece, may be the biggest eurozone threat", insight piece by Charles Dumas) warns about a possibly disastrous economic future for Spain (again). It stresses the importance of non-financial sector debts and compares the country to Japan in the late 1990s and names the measures the Japanese took to get out of that situation - which are out of the question for Spain as e.g. it cannot devalue its currency (the Euro) nor run large budget deficits. The main points are cited below, the full article is here.

But Spain’s current situation is in several respects far worse than Japan’s back then. First, Japan had a currency, which devalued in real terms by 20 per cent over the six years to 2002, aiding adjustment. Spain is fixed in the euro.
Second, having a currency, Japan also had a monetary policy – the famous “ZIRP”, zero-interest-rate-policy. Spain’s monetary conditions are set by the ECB in Frankfurt, with recent tightening that could hardly be more unsuitable for Spain.
Third, Japan had an independent fiscal policy, and ran large budget deficits to offset private-sector debt repayment via financial surpluses. Spain is under orders from its eurozone “partners” to slash its deficits, “no matter how politically painful” to quote Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, in Financial Times columns recently.
Fourth, Japan had (and has) flexible wages – downward in nominal terms as well as upward. In the six years from 1997, as recession hit, average nominal weekly wages fell by 1¼ per cent a year – and they have continued to fall (on average) since then, though more slowly. Spain, by contrast, has a consistent inflation record and in many cases index-linked wage increases. Lastly, Japan was handling its problems in a broadly expansionary world economy, which Spain regrettably cannot hope for.
The chances are high of a Spanish asset price slide and banking crisis, with stagnation (at best) or depression, if it sticks in the euro.

El País: Spanish population in decline

The story on the Spanish daily's pages here.

Thoughts from a country in crisis

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me an e-mail with the following content (my translation from the Spanish original):

Facts for thought

Will you have sex? The government will provide you with condoms.
You already had sex? The government offers you the day-after pill.
She got pregnant? The government garantees an abortion.
You got the child? The government gives you a cheque worth 2.500 Euro.
You are unemployed? The government will pay you an assistance.
You are lazy and don't like to work? The government will guarantee your survival.

Now, try to study, work, produce something and look what will happen:
the government will increase your taxes to pay for all the above mentioned.
We learn: f***, abort, be lazy as ****, but never ever think about working hard; that won't be paid by the government and you will have to sustain all the lazy folk in Spain.

I don't think that it is that extreme yet but the government is really only prolonging handouts, trying to remedy the effects but not the causes of the actual crisis. Spain is the only big country in the OECD that is still in recession, and on the verge of an unemployment rate of 20%. Last week it was about to be called equal to Greece, and the finance minister went to London to "educate" the Financial Times about the reality as she sees it. The Wall Street Journal encouraged the Spanish prime minister to put up more resistance towards the trade unions that are fighting more or less everything that looks like change. The trade unions are good institutions for those that have jobs but they don't seem to mind the young and/or unemployed. Spain will have the oldest population in Europe by 2050 and there is no way but to reform the pension system. The government wants to put the retirement age to 67 which makes sense; when Bismarck invented the modern old-age pension system, if I am not misled, the retirement age was set at 65, but hardly anyone reached that age. Today most Spaniards and Catalans live until their mid-80s...

I hope to find more time to ramble on more positively in the near future.

Political corruption

I don´t want to comment or to judge here, just to give testimony of a situation that I find noteworthy and troubling.
For quite a while now, the news on Catalan and Spanish television have been dominated by corruption scandals in various parts of the country. The party that comes off worst is the ultra-conservative Popular Party (PP). It all began with a spying scandal within the ranks of the PP in Madrid. Then came "el caso Gürtel" (Gürtel=German "belt"=Spanish "correa") around the corrupt relationships between a public relations firm (Orange Market) headed by a man named Correa and the Popular Party in Madrid and Valencia. Correa was a guest at the wedding of former Prime Minister Aznar's daughter to Alejandro Agag, another one involved in the scandal, at the El Escorial royal palace. In Valencia, the state governor was accused of taking suits in return for giving PR events to Orange Market, there headed by a name nick-named "Bigotes" for his spectacular moustache, but the case was ended inconclusively. In Mallorca, the former PP government is accused of financing the party by over-charging for a bicycle arena (PalmArena). And the latest case coming to light was around the Socialist mayor of Santa Coloma de Gramanet, a Barcelona suburb, who worked with a building firm and some intermediaries in money laundering and reclassification of land. This is the most notorious case of political corruption in Spain and it normally works like this: the municipality sells land not specified for building that it owns to a building firm on the cheap; a short time later the council decides to reclassify it, which increases its worth manifold, and the builder builds houses, shopping centers or whatever there. The builder makes a handsome profit and the municipality gets a nice tax revenue for the building, but nothing for the increased value of the land that originally was not for building. And the mayor and the others implied get a nice unofficial and tax-free bonus by the builder... These mentioned were only the most spectacular cases but it is like a national scourge. Part of the fault lies with the poor financing for communities who depend very much on building taxes. By selling the land in their property, they find a short-term remedy for their financial problems but sell the only "family silver" they have; and in the past they helped to create the real-estate bubble that burst about two years ago.

Exercises in translation (II)

from: Avui, October 11, 2009, p. 23

Spain will continue being the EU's leader in job destruction

Editorial office, Barcelona

At year's end, 3 of every ten new unemployed in the EU will be Spanish. According to the "labor euro-index," elaborated by IESE business school and temp-work agency Adecco, Spain will continue leading the job destruction, though it will be more moderate if compared to earlier trimesters. The report analyses the job market's evolution of seven European countries: Spain, France, Germany, Ital, Portugal, United Kingdom and Poland (similar to Spain in population). Taken together, these markets have registered three million people less in employment, double the number than in the three months before. "Never before in a twelve-months span our group of seven countries had destroyed so many jobs," the authors of the document stress. Germany is the country that has had a better evolution, while Spain's is the most "dramatic."

The future jobless rate
Spain has lost within a year 1,480,000 jobs, a fall of more than 7%. That means it has counted for nearly one in every two jobs lost in the EU during the past year. As to the unemployment rate, the study published by IESE and Adecco calculates that the European community rate will rise by 2.5%, as as to be at 10.3% at year's end. That means an increase of 3% in two years. If you took out Spain of this calculation, the increase would be smaller, 1.8%.

(The original in Catalan is as confusing as to numbers and semesters, trimester, years,... observed...)