Alicante airport loosing passengers.....
This year 400,000 less passengers less used El Altet, Alicante airport, than last. The crisis, the disappearance of Spanair and the conflict with Ryanair has resulted in the airport loosing more passengers than Spain’s other seven largest airports.
The lack of new property buyers, and less frequent use by foreign owners, is one of the key reasons for the loss.
….Domestic flights also
From the beginning of this year to the end of June, domestic air-traffic fell 8.4%, resulting in 3.09 million less passenger than in the same period last year.
During the same period, long distance trains had 3.8% fewer passengers.
Less Spanish tourists, more foreign
25.1 million foreign tourists visited Spain between January and June; 2.9% more than last year, however, for the second year, Spanish tourists are staying at home. Spanish customers used to account for half of all those using hotels and restaurants, so even if foreigners continue flocking in, the financial results for the tourist sector in the current year may still be mediocre.
Euribor under 1%
The main indicator to which mortgages are referenced, the Euribor, is falling and is, for the first time in history, below 1%. Good news for those who bought a dwelling (or two!) in the boom years from 2004 to 2008, financed with floating interest rate loans. owever
However, many of the buyers, with mortgages of up to 100% or more, with floating interest rates, had to leave their dream property when the Euribor shot up over the following few years. Some are still being pursued in their home countries and being forced to comply with their loan agreements.
Fraud with Health Cards
The government has discovered that health cards of 150,000 people who have died are still in use. The situation was detected upon the introduction of the new system, where patients must pay part of the cost of prescribed medicines. In addition, there are 800,000 cardholders who are not registered with the Social Security System, 200,000 registered as retired, and thus fraudulently obtaining free medication.
The question coming to mind is : How has the Social Security System been managed, when almost 1 million people have been able to access it fraudulently ?
New VAT in one week!
From 1st September, in little more than a week, the new VAT rates (we notified you which goods and services are affected) will take effect. The standard rate rises from 18 to 21% and some goods and services are being moved from the reduced rate to the standard rate, a jump of 13%.
The tax on the purchase of a permanent dwelling increases from 4% to 10%.
Reductions also in the army
The financial crisis is forcing Spain to reduce its armed forces. The Defence Minister proposes to reduce the army by 15,000 soldiers and the Military Administration by 5,000 people. Additionally, Spain’s only aircraft carrier, The Principe de Asturias, will be taken out of active service, and a supply ship will be leased to Australia.
The Spanish contingent in Afghanistan will be withdrawn before 2014, and that in The Lebanon reduced to 500 soldiers before the end of this year.
The Weekly Crisis
Rajoy is waiting, while Spain becomes paralysed.
The Prime Minister is hoping that pressure from the southern debt states on the leaders of the Euro Group, the European Central Bank and especially on Germany and Chancellor Merkel will, without limits and conditions, open the financial floodgates of that country.
Minister of Finance, Luis de Guindos, said, the gates must be opened, by the European Central Bank buying the debt states blonds, adding, ‘There can be no set limit, or at least (the ECB) cannot say how much they will spend or for how long’.
This litany has been repeated so frequently by the Spanish Government this year that even they have started to believe it will come true. The speculators have been smitten by the dreams of the Government, and are buying shares in Spanish banks and companies in case the dream becomes a reality. The Ibex has been climbing over the past weeks, up from the abyss to 7,500, and the country risk has fallen to under 500 points, which permitted the Treasury to place 4,514 million euros worth of bonds at an interest of 6.2%.
However, while Rajoy is waiting and praying, the high debts are snow-balling. The Valencia Region had to pay 340 million euros in debt interest during the first half of 2011. In the same period this year their debts had risen to 562 million, an increase of 65% ! And the sale of public buildings, which was intended to give the Generalitat an income of 500 million, have stalled: There are no buyers !
In mid-September the details of a debt buying program will be discussed in a meeting of European leaders. The conditions, if Merkel and others do not drop the requirements they have maintained so far, will probably not be to the liking of Rajoy. The first condition is that the countries which request assistance, will have to ask for it. Secondly, that controls will be imposed with the assistance of the so called ‘men in black’.
Merkel is not the only guardian of the Germany’s financial sluices, a growing number of leaders in the ruling coalition are standing on the brakes. In October the Constitutional Court will decide if Germany’s
acceptance of the latest increase in the European Rescue Fund is legal.
Finland leaving the Euro Zone?
The Finance Minister of well managed Finland, said in an interview that the Nordic country would consider leaving the Euro Zone rather than paying the debts of other countries in the block. In the Netherlands, feelings are similar, not to mention Germany.
Greece will need more money and time
Greece is off course in the program which its government accepted in order to get further European funds. They are now asking for more time to implement the program and further financial injections.
Regions greatest risk
The Regions are the greatest risk to the objective for budget deficit in this year. The Government has set their aim at 6.3%, but it seems clear most regions will exceed the limit. The biggest sinners are Castilla La Mancha (governed by the general secretary of PP) 3.1% over the aim, Catalonia (2.5% over) Baleares and Extremadura (2.2% over) Madrid, Valencia and Murcia (2.2%) and Andalucía (2% over).
Soros going for gold
Gold reached a record high in 2011, at 1,920 US dollars an ounce. Today the metal is being traded at 1,600 dollars. However, it may rise again following Georg Soros, the legendary investor, doubling his investment in the worlds largest gold fund, SPDR Gold Trust.
Miguel Ángel García Vega
Wrote the following in El Pais
Una vez más, la prudencia alemana ha vuelto a frenar la euforia en los mercados. Como ya advertían a primera hora los expertos, la importante caída de la prima de riesgo en las primeras horas de negociación podía aflojarse en cualquier momento, con la vuelta a la actividad política de la mayoría de los líderes europeos.
Bastaron unas palabras del todopoderoso banco central alemán, el Bundesbank, para frenar el desplome del diferencial español. Éste, que llegó a bajar de los 494 puntos de la apertura a 460 durante las primeras horas de la sesión, cerró en 477 unidades.
A la prudencia vista en el mercado de deuda se sumó la decepción en la Bolsa. El Ibex perdió un 1,21% esta jornada, hasta los 7.469 puntos, poniendo fin así a cinco jornadas consecutivas al alza.
Las mayores caídas se las anotaron Bankia (-4,63%), Repsol (-4,39%) y Dia (-3,16%). En el lado de las subidas destacaron Abengoa (4,16%), Banco Sabadell (2,24%) y ACS (1,62%).
El Bundesbank reiteró su rechazo a que el Banco Central Europeo (BCE) reactive la compra de bonos soberanos para quitar presión a los países atacados. Así, mantiene su posición de que "en especial las compras de títulos soberanos del eurosistema deben ser vistas de forma crítica y conllevan considerables riesgos para la política de estabilidad".
La institución que dirige Mario Draghi se muestra favorable a esta línea estratégica siempre y cuando lo soliciten expresamente los Estados afectados, lo que implícitamente conlleva a nuevas exigencias económicas. La postura del Gobierno de Mariano Rajoy es no pedir ayuda hasta que se conozcan las condiciones a las mismas.
A primera hora, la cercanía del rescate (en una versión más suave) de España animó a los inversores, en una jornada nuevamente marcada por el bajo volumen negociador, lo que también propicia movimientos bruscos.
No obstante, la prima de riesgo de España frente a Alemania también se ha reducido por el incremento del 'riesgo' germano. La rentabilidad exigida por el bono español a 10 años cedió del 6,48% al 6,28%, frente a la alemana, que rebotó hasta el 1,50%, lejos de los mínimos de julio del 1,2%.
Tras pasar mes y medio por encima de 500 puntos básicos e incluso llegar a dispararse hasta rozar los 650, el sobrecoste que los inversores exigen por comprar deuda soberana española se tomó un pequeño respiro el pasado jueves, por la proximidad de un nuevo rescate de España (sumado al de la banca por 100.000 millones y cuyo primer tramo se espera para las próximas semanas).
Lo que el mercado espera es que el Banco Central Europeo (BCE) intervenga con la compra de deuda española, que rebaje de forma importe la presión sobre nuestro país. "Esta posibilidad es cada vez más plausible", afirma la estratega de Mercados de IG Markets, Soledad Pellón, "después de las especulaciones de que esa actuación podría ser, no con cantidades concretas, sino fijando un tipo de interés máximo".
Este fin de semana, en una entrevista a Efe, el ministro de Economía, Luis de Guindos, afirmó que la intervención del BCE debe ser "contundente" y no tener de antemano fijado un límite ni de cuantía ni de duración.
Antonis Samaras, primer ministro griego, inicia la semana con una decisiva gira de encuentros con otros líderes europeos, con la intención de solicitar una ampliación de dos años más, hasta 2016, del plazo para la implementación de las medidas de austeridad acordadas en los términos del rescate.
Pero no lleva en la maleta una parte imprescindible del equipaje, el apoyo del BCE. Jörg Asmussen, miembro del Consejo Ejecutivo del Banco Central Europeo, advierte esta mañana en una entrevista concedida al diario alemán 'Frankfurter Rundschau', que "los compromisos deben cumplirse" y que la salida de Grecia de la unión monetaria sería gestionable, aunque no deseable, en una clara referencia a que no debe haber más concesiones temporales y que los griegos deben decidir entre condiciones o salida del euro.
"Yo apuesto porque Grecia permanezca en la Zona Euro, pero no depende de nosotros conseguir eso, sino de Atenas. De todos modos, no se trataría de una salida ordenada como muchos imaginan, pues se asociaría a una pérdida de crecimiento y a un mayor desempleo y sería muy costosa: para Grecia, para Europa y, cómo no, para Alemania", ha dicho.
También el secretario de Estado de Finanzas de Alemania, Steffen Kampeter, ha dicho esta mañana que "dar más tiempo a Grecia significa dar más dinero y que no se ha hablado seriamente sobre eso", en línea con lo que dijo la semana pasada el ministro de economía.
Kampeter añade que Grecia debe estar dispuesta a compensar cualquier divergencia en el programa. Se refiere sin duda a la información que publica 'Der Spiegel', que calcula hoy que Grecia necesita recortes adicionales por valor de 2.500 millones en los dos próximos años si quiere cumplir con lo pactado.
La revista alemana cita documentos de la 'troika' que revelan también que cerca de un tercio de los 11.500 millones de recortes presupuestarios ya anunciados para finales de 2014 no se han cubierto en el plan de Antonis Samaras.
La prima de riesgo griega se sitúa ahora en los 2.282 puntos, con una rentabilidad del bono del 24,33%.
Estos son los datos a que se enfrenta Samaras, que se reunirá primero con el presidente del Eurogrupo, Jean-Claude Juncker, el miércoles 22, para después hacerlo con la canciller alemana, Angela Merkel, el viernes 24, y con el presidente francés, François Hollande, al día siguiente.
Este pasado fin de semana, el ministro de Finanzas heleno, Yannis Stournaras, ha declarado que "Grecia debe permanecer en la Zona Euro para poder sobrevivir", añadiendo que es "vital que se agilicen los recortes en el gasto que se le han demandado".
There is now a very real risk that the euro-zone single currency will break up. Depending on who one asks, the odds of survival vary, as do the number of countries that might leave. The major banks and multinationals have responded and are already putting contingency plans into action. In Spain, the leading companies on the stock exchange are trying to come up with an answer to a question that is in itself a matter of life and death: if we leave the euro, what will happen to our shares and assets, our bank accounts, and our results?
The contingency plans being thought through around Europe range from creating a new currency for Germany and its satellites to selective expulsion of countries considered too great a risk or too great a burden to bear, right through to the dismantling of the euro, as well as the creation of a two-tier euro. Any of these options would have enormous implications at the commercial, fiscal, and financial level for companies, as well as putting their credibility on the line.
Among the sectors most concerned with finding a solution quickly are tourism, financial services and exports. Companies such as IAG, the owner of Iberia and British Airways, as well as Barclays, have already announced contingency plans for their Spanish operations. ING, the Dutch bank, has announced it is reducing its exposure in Spain by 6.2 billion euros.
Among the companies that have already taken measures regarding their operations in Greece are US giant Procter & Gamble; insurers Lloyds; TUI Travel and Thomas Cook, the UK’s two largest tour operators; Crédit Agricole and HSBC; and Heineken. The Swiss banks, worried about their funds, are on what one expert has called “maximum alert” about the future of the euro zone, and many companies have set up special teams to put together contingency plans and assess their options.
Many Spanish firms have been looking at possible scenarios for months now”
“A lot of Spanish firms have already been looking at the possible scenarios for several months now,” says Sara Baliña of Analistas Financieros Internacionales (AFI). “This is neither new nor surprising. It is a responsible and straightforward way of responding to the current situation we face — although the risk of Spain leaving the euro is still relatively low, at below 20 percent,” she says.
Juan Iranzo, the director general of the Instituto de Estudios Económicos (IEE), believes, for the moment, that Spain will not be leaving the euro. “But companies still have to face the possibility, and take measures. If I were them, I would try to get my money out of Spain, to sell shares before any devaluation, and to have as much capital in foreign currency as possible.”
If the peseta were to be reintroduced, and immediately devalued, the government would have to guarantee the continued supply, through imports, of important materials, and at current prices. In other words, it would have to control prices as it used to in the days of the military dictatorship, as happened with gasoline, for example. This is not exactly a reassuring scenario. AFI has drawn up several such contingency plans at the request of companies on the stock exchange. None of them is so far willing to discuss the plans.
Consultants Ernst & Young already have a team of 10 people at its Madrid office working on such plans. The team is headed by Asís Velilla, in charge of financial instruments. Velilla says the clients drawing up contingency plans for their Spanish operations foresee a situation where Portugal, Italy, Greece, Ireland and Spain leave the euro zone at the same time, and the subsequent establishment of a two-tier euro.
Any breakup would create opportunities to buy competitors at a low price”
The fear of what might happen to Spain as the euro crisis has worsened over the last four years can be outlined in the following manner. The multinationals with operations in this country were the first to begin worrying about their investments in the event of a euro exit. Next came the companies with foreign investment funds (above all those in the United States), and with seats on the boards of Spanish companies; now the alarm has spread to Spanish companies. “What they want to try to put together is an assessment of the risks they face so they can take this to the board, and depending on their accounts, take the necessary measures,” says Velilla, adding: “Let’s not forget that any breakup of the euro zone would create opportunities to buy competitors at a low price.”
Spain’s high net worth individuals are also trying to put together emergency plans to protect their money should things go wrong. Juan Esquer, a partner at GBS Finanzas, says many wealthy people have already opened accounts in Luxembourg, Germany and France, or in non-euro states such as the UK and Switzerland, or in other cases have moved their money to the United States. Up until May this year, some 163 billion euros had been taken out of the country. “But this is creating a growing problem of compliance: the banks are asking questions about the origin of all this cash, and often this is not easy to prove,” says Esquer.
Consultancy firms and other financial specialists have been working on contingency plans for at least the last year in the event of a breakup of one sort or another of the euro. These plans have begun to leak out, and are causing major headaches for the boards of many companies. “Just dealing with the legal niceties is a headache of unprecedented proportions,” says a lawyer working at one of Spain’s biggest companies.
Despite the best efforts of people such as Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker to calm the markets by saying that a Greek exit of the euro would be “manageable,” and experts such as Claudio Ortea, head of investments at Lombard Odier, who says the question is not “if, but when,” the Treaty of Lisbon does not include instructions on how to dismantle the euro. Before that could happen in any organized way, the treaty would need to be changed. However complicated that might be, the experts agree that any country that wanted to leave the euro would need to introduce legislation guaranteeing that contracts drawn up in euros would be valid. Neither is it easy to assess whether these contracts would be backed by the euro or by the new currency. The reality is most likely that they would be open to interpretation, depending on factors such as the laws of the country in question, where the assets were held, and where payments were being made.
A euro exit would involve measures like those in Argentina a decade ago
For example, if Greece were to leave the euro, it would first have to leave the EU, and then make a formal request to rejoin, but without being part of the single currency. “The euro zone was put together along the lines of a lobster trap: easy to get in, but very difficult to get out,” says Simon James, a partner at British law firm Clifford Chance.
We have come a long way from the initial murmurings about a euro breakup, with loud denials from Brussels and Berlin, to the point where there is now open talk on how best this might be brought about. British consultants Capital Economics last month won the Wolfson Economics Prize with a piece of work entitled, Leaving the euro: A practical guide. As its name suggests, it details with chilling precision how countries would bring about a euro exit, and what the likely immediate consequences would be.
The authors suggest that countries leaving the euro set up a new currency with one-to-one parity with the euro from the first day of their exit and that all salaries, prices, loans, and deposits be immediately denominated in relation to parity. They add that the euro continue to be used for small transactions for no more than six months. The country that leaves the euro zone would immediately have to announce a plan to control inflation overseen by an independent institution, ban the indexing of salaries, and issue inflation-linked bonds. To avoid capital flight, the capital markets would have to be closed. In other words, it would be a series of measures very similar to those introduced in Argentina a decade ago, during the so-called corralito, which saw thousands lose their savings overnight.
This is the scenario that faces Greece — should it jump, or be pushed, out of the euro? But what about Spain? “The same measure would pretty much apply here as well,” says Jonathan Loynes, the chief economist for Europe at Capital Economics, and one of the authors of the study.
Nobody wants to be paid in a devalued currency, that is simply losing money”
“The Lisbon Treaty allows for measures to restrict the free movement of capital for reasons of public order,” says Íñigo Berricano, managing director of law firm Linklaters. “Therefore, if we reach this point, which I don’t think we will, the Spanish government would have to set exchange control mechanisms to prevent capital flight. Such measures would have to be set up before any exit.”
And on the other side of the Atlantic? Firms such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America have been covering their backs against a possible euro breakup, renegotiating their contracts with European clients and at the same time using forms of non-payment insurance, such as credit default swaps (CDS), to reduce their exposure to those countries in biggest difficulty.
Behind the scenes, efforts are underway to make sure that if Spain or Greece do leave the euro, the banks do not get paid their money back in devalued pesetas or drachmas. For the moment, the banks are exposed to around 4.4 billion euros in Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain, along with some 20 billion euros in the case of JP Morgan. “These are relatively small amounts of money, and so the speed with which they have reduced their debt balances in the periphery countries,” says the director of a major Swiss bank based in Spain.
Soledad Pellón, an analyst at IG Markets, adds: “Nobody wants to be paid in a devalued currency, that is simply losing money.”
In the final analysis, says Douglas J. Elliott, the former vice president of JP Morgan, there are three likely outcomes of this nightmare scenario: “The gradual resolution of the problems in the euro zone (10 percent chance); that things get worse before they get better (65 percent chance); and that the whole euro project simply collapses (25 percent chance).”
“In the event of a total collapse, Greece would very likely be forced by its circumstances to leave the euro, as would other countries. Europe would fall into a deeper recession, the US economy would slow down further, and countries like China would see a sharp downturn. The only real winner in all this, if it were to happen between now and November, would be Mitt Romney, given that a worsening US economy would probably propel him into the White House,” adds Elliott.
In Spiegel we found the following:
A Visit To Absurdistan-What Happened to the Spain Where I Was Born?
By Juan Moreno
SPIEGEL reporter Juan Moreno grew up in Germany as the son of Spanish immigrants. He cherished summers spent as a child in his parents' former village. He recently traveled back to his country of birth to trace the causes of the crisis and to meet those whose lives it has changed in heartbreaking ways.
A few months ago, I was interviewed by a short, roundish man, a Spanish TV host I had never seen but who every child in Spain knows: Jordi Évole. He used to be the sidekick of a late-night talk show host. We met on a cold, wet Saturday morning at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Évole asked me to talk about Germany -- as the son of Spanish immigrants, but mostly as a German. He wanted me to explain what we, the Germans, are doing right and they, the Spaniards, are doing wrong. Évole hosts one of the most successful programs on Spanish television. He is both an investigative journalist and a comedian.
What did he expect me to say? That you can't take an economy seriously when it's based on sun and oranges and the overdevelopment of the Mediterranean coast? That Spanish football clubs shouldn't owe €750 million ($915 million) in back taxes? That, according to the latest PISA study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development comparing international education systems, Spain's schoolchildren have not improved, despite record tax revenues before the crisis?
I've recently thought a lot about that conversation, about the Spanish economic crisis and about whether I really know what things look like in my native Spain.
My parents are former farmers from Andalusia who went to Germany in the 1970s and worked in a tire factory in Hanau near Frankfurt until their retirement. My father went to school for four years. There were no textbooks. The teacher used an old encyclopedia. My dad made it to volume D, or perhaps F. In any case, the education his country offered him was a disgrace. He emigrated when he was 17.
I was born in Spain, I have a Spanish name, I speak at a Spanish pace, I have a Spanish passport, and I'm happy that Spain won the European Championship. But I live in Germany, where I went to school and work today.
My most intense memories of Spain go back more than 25 years, even though I've visited since then. They are the glorified summer memories of childhood. My family was part of that caravan of guest workers (the wave of immigrants who came to Germany during the postwar years) who would load up the Opel and drive home to Spain every year, first through France, and then along the Mediterranean coast to my parents' village. We would spend 30 hours in the car, stopping only at gas stations, with a chain-smoking father at the wheel. The back seat was for me, my two brothers and one suitcase. I loved those trips.
Revisiting Spain
After the conversation with Jordi Évole, I decided to make the trip again; driving along the coast as we had done before, but taking more time to talk to people. I wanted them to explain to me what had happened to Spain, a country that has been driving me to insanity for some time. I couldn't even say exactly why. Could it be the inability to produce something meaningful, the disgusting overdevelopment, the audacity with which Spaniards expect help from the bailout fund?
The first real Spanish big city I can remember is Barcelona. That's where my trip begins. Back then, it wasn't a city of boutique hotels and tapas in the Barri Gòtic Gothic Quarter or of Romance studies students learning Spanish and searching for meaning in Barcelona. In my childhood, it was a city without a beltway. It hadn't been built yet. My father hated the anarchy of traffic, SEAT cars, the Guardia Civil, which, in the early 1980s, had lost Franco's protection but not its disgusting arrogance. Despite the heat, my mother forced us to roll up the windows. Confidence tricksters were waiting for German cars at the traffic lights, she said. I hated Barcelona.
It's different in 2012. I arrive after Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has prepared Europe for the possibility that rescuing Spanish banks could cost €100 billion ($123 billion). Previously, he had claimed that Spain would never need help.
I watch the news on television in my hotel room. As usual, it consists of two parts: the horror film and the fairy-tale hour. More and more depositors are emptying their accounts, the Spanish autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha is closing 70 schools, unemployment is almost 25 percent -- that's the horror film. In the fairy-tale hour, they talk about the Spanish national football team.
After watching the news in Spain for a while, you understand why half the airtime is devoted to sports. If it weren't, people would go mad. Everything revolves around the crisis. Really everything. A DIY superstore advertises 200 jobs and gets 12,000 applications. Academics conceal their degrees on job applications in order to compete with people with inferior qualifications. There are street battles in Asturias between striking miners and the police. Sales of safes are on the rise.
This isn't news. It's terror.
Finding the Crisis in Barcelona
Barcelona is full of tourists. The number of overnight stays increased last year. The cafés around Plaça Catalunya still serve overpriced coffee, while the police chase away beggars. To find the crisis, you have to walk a few blocks away.
At an intersection on Avinguda Diagonal, I encounter Pedro Panlador, a slight man who has positioned himself in front of a Bankia branch. He wants to storm the bank. A few like-minded people have joined him. They called the offices of newspapers so that they would report on their protest, but the papers declined. Banks are being stormed all over Spain at the moment.
Bankia, a bank from Madrid, evicted Panlador from his condominium because he could no longer make his loan payments. In the first three months of this year, the occupants of 200 apartments and houses were evicted every day throughout Spain.
Panlador, born in Colombia, has lived in Barcelona for 12 years. He currently has €242,000 in debt. He was a chauffeur before the crisis. Now he's been unemployed for over two years.
Pedestrians walk by, some encouraging him and some applauding. No one thinks it's wrong to be standing in front of a bank and calling the employees "criminals." Panlador says that he intends to remain "peaceful" and that he only wants to "speak with the director."
Bankia lost €3 billion in 2011, and now the bank needs more than €20 billion to avoid going into bankruptcy and bringing down the Spanish financial system with it. The last CEO was Rodrigo Rato, who served as finance minister under former Prime Minister José María Aznar. Rato was also managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) until 2007. It's possible that the IMF will soon have to rescue Spain. It sounds like a joke.
Panlador and his boys are ready to begin storming the bank. They're doing this for the first time. Panlador has already camped out in front of a Bankia branch before, but he feels that storming a bank makes a greater impression. He musters up courage and walks up to the entrance, where he sees that the branch has a security door and a doorbell.
He rings the doorbell.
Bankia doesn't open the door.
Panlador turns to the others. They look a little clueless. Finally, someone blows a whistle.
Panlador slaps a few stickers onto the glass. The banks should stop suing delinquent customers and evicting them from their apartments, the stickers read. Spain, it seems, has become a country of sad protests.
Panlador takes a few steps back. Personal bankruptcy doesn't exist in Spain. His debt of €242,000 will stay with him his whole life. "I'm tired," he says.
One would think that protests need the occasional minor success, something that offers hope that the struggle is worthwhile. One would also think that it's important to know who the enemy is.
But who is to blame? Bankia, because it gave a quarter-million-euro loan to a man who was making €940 a month after taxes? Or Panlador, because he took out the loan? No one forced him to do it. Perhaps both are to blame.
Or maybe it comes down to that sea of opportunities. There was construction underway and money being made everywhere. There was cheap money, and banks were practically giving it away, there was housing that seemed to finance itself, and there were jobs galore.
All of this transformed the Spaniards into gambling addicts and the country into a casino. People no longer had to suffer the indignity of a neighbor having a house in Conil on the Costa de la Luz while they had only a weekend cottage on the outskirts of the city. Who would have predicted that it would all end with people like Pedro Panlador standing in front of a bank and being denied entry because of a doorbell?
I shake his hand and wish him luck. Barcelona is a beautiful city, much more so than Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich, despite the "For Sale" signs hanging from balconies and the gold dealers opening up shop everywhere to sell the jewelry of desperate Spaniards.
To me, the city feels like the wife of a factory manager who refuses to believe that the company is bankrupt. She still has her fur coat, her diamond ring and her china -- but everyone knows it'll be over soon.
The unemployment rate in Barcelona rose from 7 to 17.7 percent last year. Barcelona is Spain's richest city, and yet 17.7 percent of its working population is unemployed.
I get into the car and leave Barcelona. I have an appointment in Sabadell, a former textile-manufacturing town. I'm going to meet Antonio, a family man, who has also lost his home. But he doesn't want to storm a bank. Instead, he is truly defending himself. He has occupied an apartment.
It's early afternoon, and Antonio is standing in the door to the apartment. He knows what I'm thinking. Antonio looks like George Clooney.
"I know," he says, "everyone says that."
Antonio steps into the narrow hallway and shows me the tiny bathroom, an eat-in kitchen with a large refrigerator, and a bedroom in which there are two beds, each with a stuffed animal on it.
"That's it," says Antonio. Two rooms on the ground floor, his new home. There are several boxes stacked in the bathroom.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two days."
"How did you get in?"
"I can't say, but I used to be a welder. My girls will be sleeping here for the first time tomorrow."
Antonio has two daughters, 14- and 17-years-old. The younger one goes to school, and the older one is in a training program to become a hairdresser. But because of the crisis, she isn't being paid, and she's also the only one from her former class who has found a position at all. Antonio pushes aside a stuffed-animal duck and sits down on the bed.
Antonio Zamora Hidalgo, 47, a quiet type, began his fight against the system two days ago. He worked in a metal factory for more than 20 years and, for 12 years, he paid the mortgage payments for his apartment to BBVA, a major Spanish bank. When he stopped making the payments, he lost everything.
There is no equivalent of Germany's Hartz IV welfare payments for the long-term unemployed in Spain. There is, however, a rule stating that the borrower cannot simply return a property to the lender to settle his debt. In the worse case, he stands to lose the property and still owe the bank the full purchase price.
Hidalgo had run out of options. He didn't know what to do with the children. His wife left him because she couldn't cope with what happened to the family. Antonio turned to PAH, a local initiative in Barcelona, where he was told that 20 percent of apartments in Spain are empty. One of them was the apartment in Sabadell, which hadn't been occupied in five years.
The small apartment is on a quiet side street in the Can n'Oriac neighborhood. It belongs to Caixa Catalunya, one of those megalomaniacal Spanish provincial savings banks that had issued mortgage loans indiscriminately in recent years and had to be bailed out with taxpayer money.
"Is this what you imagined it would be like?" Antonio asks.
I look around the tiny room. The two beds take up almost all the space.
"If you're going to occupy an apartment illegally, why not a bigger one?" I ask.
Antonio laughs. He wasn't referring to the apartment, he says, but to the situation in Spain.
"I can tell you what the situation is like," says Antonio. "The situation is that guys like me are occupying apartments."
Who's at fault now, I wonder as I'm driving on the highway. The man has never been in trouble with the police. He doesn't drink, isn't an anarchist or a leftist, and he doesn't even watch the news. Now he's a squatter. Maybe he was simply unlucky and was dragged down when the snowballing system of cheap loans and rising real estate prices they called the Spanish economic miracle collapsed, a period described in a Time cover story titled "Spain Rocks."
A €150 Million Airport That's Never Been Used
I reach Castellón, a somewhat sleepy coastal city on the Mediterranean, with a nice park and a phenomenally ugly department store.
As a child, I liked Castellón, the last place where we stopped to get gas before reaching our village. I'm here because I want to know why Castellón built an airport from which no aircraft has ever taken off, an airport that cost €150 million in a city that's only 65 kilometers from Valencia, which already has an airport that's much too big for the region.
I leave the Autopista del Mediterráneo and drive along the CV-10 toward the Castellón airport. The CV-10 is the best highway I've ever driven on. The asphalt is perfect, the signs are new, and there is grass in the median. After about half an hour, I'm standing in front of a fence arguing with a security guard. The man reaches for his radio and says: "Serra 1 to Serra 2, we have a code 3!"
You can trigger a code 3 by asking a guard at the fence whether you can take a look at the airport from up close, an airport that was built with taxpayer money and was officially opened on March 25, 2011.
I get out of the car. Behind me is a large sculpture standing at the access road to the airport. A good friend of a local politician is still working on the piece, which is unbelievably ugly and reportedly cost €300,000. The guard talks into his radio. From where I'm standing, I can see the tower, some of the 3,000 parking spaces and a portion of the 2,700-meter (8,856-foot) runway.
"I gave your license plate number to the police," says the guard. I nod and think to myself that the Castellón airport isn't even the most pointless -- and certainly not the most costly -- airport in Spain. An airport was built in Ciudad Real, 160 kilometers from Madrid, at a cost of €1 billion. It now serves small private aircraft.
For years, Castellón suffered from the fact that it wasn't as important, rich or well-known as Valencia and Alicante, the other two major cities in the region. Someone hit upon the idea of changing that by building 17 golf courses. Seventeen 18-hole golf courses translate into a lot of golfers, hence the airport. The golf courses never materialized.
The city behaved like a microcosm of Spain as a whole. Spain didn't want to be Europe's little brother. It wanted real airports and real highways. The days were gone when people like my father would arrive at a German train station in jackets too thin for the climate. The new Spain could play football, and it had companies like global telecommunications giant Telefónica and world-famous chefs like Ferran Adrià.
I leave the guard standing where he is and return to the highway. I'll be in my parents' village in three hours. A small detour takes me past a large construction site on which the Spanish railroad system is building another high-speed line. The country has more high-speed rail lines than Germany or France.
I ask myself what it must have been like to be a politician in the boom years, a period of senseless intoxication and time without measure. To be re-elected, many politicians had to have something to show for themselves, a project, and preferably one built of stone and concrete. Playing fields, theaters, swimming pools and streetcars were popping up everywhere. The economy had gone mad, and so had politicians. But the democracy was fully functional. Spaniards could have asked where all the money was coming from, and why roads were improving and trains were getting faster, while their children were doing worse in school. They could have elected different politicians, more level-headed ones. I firmly believe that every village, every town and every province got exactly the politician it deserved.
The Journey's End
I reach my parents' village, Huércal-Overa, now a city of 18,000 people in a province called Almería. The area is known as the desert of Europe, dry and unbearably hot in the summer. The German director Bully Herbig filmed "Der Schuh des Manitu," or the "Manitou's Shoe," a comedy remake of Germany's Manitou series of Wild West films in Almería. This is where my journey ends.
We used to stay at my grandparents' house a little outside of town. There was no toilet or electricity. That was in the 1980s. Today the city has a public theater, a new Plaza Mayor, an indoor public pool, a new outdoor pool, a zoo, a park, a newly designed downtown and rows of half-finished houses.
My parents' house is at the northern end of the city, a plain and somewhat ugly home. They put all of their savings into this 130-square-meter (1,400-square-foot) house. The only luxurious feature is an absurdly oversized air-conditioning unit on the roof, which can easily transform our living room into a polar landscape.
I've asked my parents to call a few of my family members, so that they can tell me about their lives in Spain.
My Uncle Juan has been working on a farm for 20 years. He plants tomatoes, walks through the greenhouses with fertilizer and works during the harvest. It's a brutal job, but he's never complained about it in my presence. Before the boom, he was making about €3 an hour, and now, about 10 years later, he still earns less than €4 an hour. He drove a small car before the crisis, and he still drives one today. Juan says that he didn't need the crisis to know that he isn't part of wealthy Europe. He just happens to be poor, he says, because he's from the south.
My cousin Pepe was a different story. As a teenager, he sold shoes at local weekly markets, and later French fries and peanuts. He eventually got a truck-driver's license and tried his hand as an independent trucker. He would have become a gold prospector 150 years ago.
Then came the boom years, the perfect time for people like Pepe, people who didn't want to remain poor. At first he drove his own truck, and then he expanded to two, three and eventually eight or nine trucks. There was plenty of work, and he was constantly attracting new customers: a brewery, a auto-parts supplier, a wholesaler's temporary warehouse. His wife gave him a black Audi A6 for his 40th birthday. I was invited to the party. They had made it. The house was paid off, they were driving a German car and their daughter had just started medical school.
Pepe was one of the funniest people I know. No one could tell more dirty jokes. That Pepe no longer exists.
My cousin is a sick man today. My father paid for his last treatment with a psychiatrist. Pepe doesn't tell anyone in the family how much debt he has, but it must be millions, and we've all come to terms with the fact that he'll never be debt-free again. His daughter, the medical student, works as a supermarket cashier. When I see him on the day after my arrival, he, my father and I have a coffee together. Pepe says only two words, "hola" and, at the end, "adios."
The crisis has changed him, and it's changing Spain. Perhaps the country is recognizing that there are no shortcuts to Europe, and no clever tricks. Simply introducing a hard currency, building dozens of airports, rail lines and golf courses, and putting an A6 in every garage -- that doesn't work.
Instead, the road is tedious and well-known. It starts with education, research and the fostering of entrepreneurs. The Spaniards can do all of this. They are a great people, my people, but the crisis has shown them where they stand: at the edge of Europe, not at its center. The real estate boom, cheap money and euphoria have seduced them -- not because they are bad or lazy, but because they're people.
Si (
No(
