By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | As was expected, Italy saw a considerable drop in its GDP in the first quarter, namely 0.8%, higher than the one recorded in the last two quarters. This suggests that the recession is biting deeper and shows just how deep. The year-on-year rate of change in GDP therefore fell to -1.3%. This contraction in the level of the activity can be explained by…
LONDON | Unlike the rest of planet? London businesses are more optimistic than six months ago about the prospects for the economy and for their own companies. The CBI/KPMG London Business Survey is conducted twice a year to monitor the views of business on London as a place to do business. Encouragingly in the latest survey of 264 companies, 41% of respondents say they feel more optimistic about the economy during the…
MADRID | “It is time to resort to the International Monetary Fund or the European rescue fund,” wrote in the January edition of Revista Consejeros Aristóbulo de Juan, former Bank of Spain's director general of inspection. Even Banco Santander's chairman Emilio Botín, who's always shown his antipathy to salvage competitors with his money or the taxpayers', acknowledged that the Spanish banking sector needed some €40 billion in European aid to…
LONDON | The People's Bank of China eased the cost of credit with a 25-basic point cut on the benchmark interest rates, unlike its counter-parties in Europe. The Chinese central bank set the 1-year lending rate at 6.31 percent from 6.56 percent, and issued new conditions under which retail banks are allowed to offer loans, now with a 20 percent discount instead of the previous official 10 percent. Is the…
The euro zone index of consumer sentiment in May confirmed a relative improvement this month, drawing a less negative private consumption this quarter. This would indicate a rate of contraction in both the first and the second quarter of about -0.5% (-0.7% in the fourth quarter). Retail sales data, to be published today, are expected to slowdown its worsening. They would also point to a contraction rate of about -0.5%….
By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | In spite of an improvement in the economic climate in February and March, available indicators point to stagnation in the first quarter of 2012, representing a slowdown compared with the 0.2% quarter-on-quarter expansion in GDP posted in the last quarter of 2011. We have kept to our forecast of very modest growth for the whole of 2012 due to the situation of some…
MADRID | The turnover of audit firms in Spain increased by 2.2% in 2011 to over 2.8 billion, thus extending the trend of steady moderate growth in the previous two years. Tax and legal advice, and corporate finance experienced a more dynamic activity level, while the audit and consulting areas grew by 1%. A study of the sector published by DBK showed that audit firms managed to increase its sales in 2011,…
LONDON | This is what happens when the size of your construction sector remains under the 10 percent per GDP level, and the cost of credit for the State and the country’s banking sector is mild enough as to allow a slow deleverage process. The Nationwide house price index reported Thursday that UK house prices edge up by 0.3% in May. Over the last eighteen months, house prices have been remarkably stable…
LONDON | While the European Central Bank and the Spanish government argued on Wednesday about the best mechanism to salvage Bankia, Caroline Keen, a member of the team managing the Newton Asian income fund at investment house BNY Mellon, said euro crisis contagion was rapidly developing elsewhere, too. Keen warned that economic headwinds from the euro zone were likely to affect the Asia-Pacific ex Japan region for the remainder of…
LONDON | Is there in these recent Brazil’s data a lesson for those in the Old Continent whose only talk is internal devaluation via salary cuts to regain competitiveness, while keeping the common currency too high for irrational fear of the inflation ghost? March brought a negative surprise with consumer credit non-performance rates in Brazil, which ticked up to 7.6% after having fallen to 7.4% in February. But that shouldn’t be…