{"id":16571,"date":"2016-01-17T09:26:42","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T14:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16571"},"modified":"2016-01-17T09:26:42","modified_gmt":"2016-01-17T14:26:42","slug":"everything-has-come-to-a-standstill-political-fallout-hits-business-in-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16571","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEverything Has Come to a Standstill\u201d: Political Fallout Hits Business in Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cEverything Has Come to a Standstill\u201d: Political Fallout Hits Business in Spain<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Things are likely to get a whole lot uglier.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Friday, Spain\u2019s benchmark stock index, the Ibex 35, plumbed depths it had not seen since the worst days of 2013, the year that the country\u2019s economy began its \u201cmiraculous\u201d recovery. Of the 35 companies listed on the index, 15 (or 40%) are \u2013 to quote\u00a0El Economista<\/a><\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cagainst the ropes,\u201d having lost over a third of their stock value in the last 9 months. Only one of the 35 companies \u2014 the technology firm Indra \u2014 is still green for 2016.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t make Spain much different from other countries right now, what with financial markets sinking\u00a0in synchronized fashion all over the world. What\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0make Spain different is that it has no elected government to try to navigate the country though these testing times, or at least take the blame for the pain.<\/p>\n

Inevitable comparisons have been drawn with Belgium, which between 2011 and 2012 endured 541 days of government-free living. However, Spain is not Belgium: its democratic system of governance is younger, less firmly rooted, and more fragile, and its civil service is more politically compromised.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, Spain\u2019s richest region, Catalonia, which accounts for 20% of the country\u2019s economy, bucked expectations last week by cobbling together a last-minute coalition government that seems intent on declaring independence within the next 15 months.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, business confidence, the cornerstone of any economic recovery, is beginning to crumble. Spain\u2019s leading index of business confidence, ICEA, just\u00a0registered a drop of 1.3%<\/a>, breaking a straight eleven-quarter run of positive results. For the first time in almost three years more business leaders are pessimistic than optimistic about the economy\u2019s outlook.<\/p>\n

This should come as little surprise in a country where unemployment is still firmly on the wrong side of the 20% mark, over a quarter of the new jobs created last year had a contract lasting less than one week, and public debt is higher than it\u2019s ever been [read:\u00a0Six Nagging Facts About Spain\u2019s \u201cRecovery\u201d<\/a>].<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEverything Has Come to a Standstill\u201d: Political Fallout Hits Business in Spain Things are likely to get a whole lot uglier. On Friday, Spain\u2019s benchmark stock index, the Ibex 35, plumbed depths it had not seen since the worst days of 2013, the year that the country\u2019s economy began its \u201cmiraculous\u201d recovery. Of the 35 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[117,5660,11766,743,4255],"class_list":["post-16571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-catalonia","tag-don-quijones","tag-ibex","tag-spain","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16572,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16571\/revisions\/16572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}