No todos son tan optimistas

La semana pasada, a pesar de la caída de Portugal en las garras de la ortodoxia presupuestaria europea para hacer frente a sus compromisos con acreedores, nuestra deuda soberana resistió bien y el diferencial g con el bono alemán no creció. Es más, todo fueron elogios para Zapatero y Salgado, incluso del FT. Creo que todo es una campaña de marketing para que los malvados mercados no nos castiguen. Parece que los analistas financieros se guían por el marketing político más que por los fríos análisis de números y políticas. Sin embargo, hoy un artículo bien razonado en el mismo periódico explica por qué España será la siguiente en caer: But the Spanish private sector debt-to-GDP ratio is 170 per cent. The current account deficit peaked at 10 per cent of GDP in 2008, but remains unsustainably high, with projected rates of more than 3 per cent until 2015. This means that Spain will continue to accumulate net foreign debt. The country’s net international investment position – the difference between external financial assets and external liabilities – was minus €926bn at the end of 2010, according to the Bank of Spain, or almost 90 per cent of GDP. If my hunch on the Spanish property market proves correct, I would expect the Spanish banking sector to need more capital than is currently estimated. It is hard to say how much because we are well outside the scope of forecasting models. When prices drop so fast, there will be much endogenous pressure that no stress test could ever capture. The mix of high external indebtedness, the fragility of the financial sector and the probability of further declines in asset prices increase the probability of a funding squeeze at some point. And that means that Spain will be the next country to seek financial assistance from the EU and the International Monetary Fund. As for the large number of official statements that Spain is safe, I think they are merely a metric of the complacency that has characterised the European crisis from the start.