{"id":19769,"date":"2016-04-11T12:27:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T17:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19769"},"modified":"2016-04-11T12:27:42","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T17:27:42","slug":"next-shoe-to-drop-on-spanish-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19769","title":{"rendered":"Next Shoe to Drop on Spanish Banks"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2016\/04\/10\/mortgage-floor-clauses-to-hit-spanish-banks\/\" target=\"_blank\">Next Shoe to Drop on Spanish Banks<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><strong>\u201cThe mortgage \u2018floor clauses\u2019 are a fraud.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thursday, April 7, 2016, could go down in history as a great day for Spanish mortgage holders and a very grim one for many Spanish banks, thanks to a new ruling that the so-called mortgage floor-clauses that were unleashed across the whole financial sector in 2009 are abusive (but not illegal) and lack transparency.<\/p>\n<p>These floor clauses set a minimum interest rate \u2014 typically of between 3%\u00a0and 4.5%\u00a0\u2014 for\u00a0variable-rate mortgages, even if the Euribor drops far below that figure. In other words, the mortgages are only really variable in one direction: upwards!<\/p>\n<p>Following the latest ruling, the banks named in the suit must reimburse clients all the money they\u2019ve surreptitiously overcharged them since May 2013. And if they want to continue applying floor clauses in the future, the banks must do so in an open and transparent manner, which pretty much defeats the purpose, since if banks were completely up front about the inclusion of floor clauses in their contracts and what that actually means to the mortgage holder, no one in their right mind would accept them.<\/p>\n<p>Thursday\u2019s ruling comes on the heels of a similar sentence by Spain\u2019s Supreme Court in October 2013. But whereas the Supreme Court ruling applied to just three banks, the new one applies to almost all of them. It is also the first time that such a large class action suit, with over 15,000 claimants, has been successful. It is now broadly assumed \u2014 meaning by everyone\u00a0<em>except the banks and their lawyers<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 that the ruling has set a legal precedent that should now apply to all of the 2.5 million mortgage holders affected by the abusive (but not illegal) practice.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Next Shoe to Drop on Spanish Banks \u201cThe mortgage \u2018floor clauses\u2019 are a fraud.\u201d Thursday, April 7, 2016, could go down in history as a great day for Spanish mortgage holders and a very grim one for many Spanish banks, thanks to a new ruling that the so-called mortgage floor-clauses that were unleashed across the [&hellip;]<\/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":[175,5660,1583,2339,743,10932,4255],"class_list":["post-19769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-credit","tag-don-quijones","tag-housing","tag-mortgages","tag-spain","tag-spanish-banks","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19769","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=19769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19770,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19769\/revisions\/19770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}