Espagne...

Generali

Oh dear:

- Retail sales down 9.8% over the past 12 months, apparently not weather related
- Public debt costs rising by the day (now Spainish debt yields more than 5 percentage points more than Germany's)
- One bank alone (Bankia) needs to receive at least an extra EUR19,000,000,000 from the state (up from EUR 5,000,000,000 a couple of weeks ago)
- Unemployment :mad:

Bailing out Spain will wipe out the bailout fund. What then happens to Portugal and (possibly) Italy?

Hoopie1

Things should be fine, they are thinking about giving them another year to meet the 3% deficit target. I'm sure they'll do that comfortably in 2013 given how things are on the up and up right now.

The_J

The sky, most definitely, is falling in.

AndyGuil

Greece is more than enough to cause a mess. Spain can not be redeemed. Countries need to start leaving the Euro so they can start devaluing their currencies.

Generali

The_J wrote: »

The sky, most definitely, is falling in.

LOL!

As I keep saying, nobody ploughed salt into the soil or dug up the roads or blew up the hospitals. The only problem is with money, the economy is stronger than it's ever been.

As Douglas Adams said (to paraphrase), most of the solutions involve the movement of small green pieces of paper which is funny because it isn't the small green pieces of paper that are unhappy.

kabayiri

The_J wrote: »

The sky, most definitely, is falling in.

When (and if) the sky does 'fall in' it will be the average person in the Euro street who will find out last.

All the rich and Eurocratic types will have long since switched to hard currency like the TB (Tradable Beemer).

There will be hour long specials on Panorama covering how most of us were actually looking at a 'picture of the sky' rather than the actual sky itself.

(I've copyrighted the name 'SkyGate' in case Hollywood comes a knocking )

The_J

Greece, Spain and Portugal imploding will be savage but I think the Euro could survive that.

But it then leaves Italy wide open, like a seal bleeding in shark infested waters. If Italy goes....uh oh!

The Terminator was wrong, it's not Skynet that ends the world, it's Skygate.

This could all be fixed if Germany left and allowed the Euro to devalue massively. The French would probably be the biggest losers though and it looks like Hollande is unwilling to take that given the French record with traitors.

AndyGuil

Italy is not far behind. They will go down near enough together. Their bond yields are already exceptionally high. Spain is well over the "unsustainable" 6% and Italy is only a touch below it. It was a very slippy slope when Greece went over 6% and they are none are in position to recover. The markets are taking it all down whether they like it or not.

Graham_Devon

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18261949

Bonds now demanding 6.7%.

Eurocrats have said exactly the same to spain as they did Greece. It's almost a mirror image watching it unfold.

Spain must cut harder and faster. They may even get told to pay their taxes by tax dodgers!

They may even decide to have a meeting about it all, but postpone the meeting for a couple of months to see "how things go".

MacMickster

We are now getting closer to the end game, which most people (other than the Eurocrats themselves) have known was inevitable for some time.

Alarmingly, there seems to be no consensus about how to play that end game. All efforts to date seem to have been concentrated on turning back the incoming tide. Now it seems that the tide is about to wash over us all and nobody thought about constructing a lifeboat. Consequently we will see which economies prove to be the strongest swimmers. Oh to be able to swim like a BRIC on this occasion!

IronWolf

Since when is 6% bond yield exceptionally high? Historically it's pretty average and plenty of countries have survived with those kind of interest rates for decades.