Deep crisis in Spain
I will try to explain why it will be an economical depression in Spain in next future. You can also read this english article about it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/05/16/cnspain16.xml
The price of houses and flats in Spain has been growing at a rate about 15% per year, during 40 years. As an example, think about my own flat: it now could cost about 300,000 €, in 1997 the bank valued it at about 100,000 €, in 1980 my family bought it at 16,500 €, and originally in 1967 the cost for the first owner was 1,350 €. That is about double each 5 years. Now, the average flat value is more than 6 times the average salary in a year.
So, until recently, everybody thought that a flat price will never go down, and so, people bought all that they could, with the help of bank credits. Here is one of the problems: credits. Mean debt of spanish people is about 270% of the income in one year. That effect has been bigger since the Euro, in 2002, because interest rates for mortages (home credits) was very low, about 3%. And also because many people wanted to "clean" their ilegal money buying houses (not the normal people, but people with bussines and extra money).
Another important data is that, because of the previous, building has been the most important economical sector of Spain. So much that last year there was 800,000 new homes, similar than in U.S., and more than in France, Italy and Germany together. But Spain is just 40 million people.
All that is changing now. Interest rates of Euro are now about 4%, double than two years ago, and growing. It means that the cuote of credits that people must pay is growing up too much, because most of the credits are floating interest rate (not fixed interest). Bank credits are not so easy to get now, and building rate is vanishing quickly. Home prices begun to stop in 2006, and now is more difficult to find a buyer.
If you put all that together, you can see:
- many people and bussines with great difficulty to pay credits,
- as more than one million people works directly in building sector, there will be a lot of unemployment.
- as banks will can not recover all their money, they will get financial difficulties, and could be a bank crisis, like in Argentina in 2001 (people could not get the money from their bank account)
The result will be what in economics is called "recession". Economic activity will decrese, inflaction and unemployment will grow. I think that home prices will be half than now in few years. It happened in Japan since 1991, and it is also happening in U.S., there is also a property crisis there. But spanish one will be stronger, much more stronger.
- blog de Enrique Santos
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La economía estudia los procesos de producción, intercambio y consumo de bienes y servicios.
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- no existe ningún sistema de referencia absoluto de valoración de las cosas. Esto es, no hay ningún bien cuyo valor sea intrínseco e inmutable.
- Principio de valoración económica:
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El dinero es solo un BIEN DE CAMBIO.
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