{"id":20190,"date":"2016-04-24T08:56:31","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T13:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20190"},"modified":"2016-04-24T08:56:31","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T13:56:31","slug":"with-impeccable-timing-economic-miracle-in-spain-unravels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20190","title":{"rendered":"With Impeccable Timing, \u2018Economic Miracle\u2019 in Spain Unravels"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With Impeccable Timing, \u2018Economic Miracle\u2019 in Spain Unravels<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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The European Union on the verge.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the granddaddy of all housing bubbles popped in Spain between 2008 and 2009, unleashing one of the deepest recessions in living memory, the nation\u2019s public debt has more than doubled, from just over 40% of GDP to almost exactly 100% today. Last year, despite the fact that Spain grew faster than almost any other European economy, the government managed to rack up a deficit of 5.2%, one full percentage point above the target that it had set itself a year earlier and over three percentage points above the\u00a0Eurozone average<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the third-highest deficit-to-GDP ratio in the Eurozone after Greece and Portugal. That\u2019s some claim for Europe\u2019s supposed economic success story.<\/p>\n

This is the\u00a0eighth consecutive year<\/a>\u00a0that Spain has overshot its fiscal target. Originally, the Spanish government\u00a0was supposed<\/a>\u00a0to get its deficit back below the EU\u2019s sacred limit of 3% of GDP by 2013. When it became clear during the darkest days of the crisis that it would be\u00a0impossible, the deadline was extended by a year. A year later, Madrid had made so little progress that it got a further two-year extension, to 2016.<\/p>\n

But still there\u2019s no sign of progress. None of which should come as a surprise. As\u00a0WOLF STREET warned in October<\/a>, it was plain as day that the Spanish government would fail to rein in its spending during the run-up to a tightly fought general election.\u00a0Brussels was completely aware of this fact and did nothing to address it, for obvious reasons: political expedience.<\/p>\n

Brussels along with\u00a0Spain\u2019s big banks, corporate giants, and the Troika wanted the conservative Rajoy government to win December\u2019s do-or-die general elections. They\u2019d do \u201cwhatever it takes\u201d to keep the narrative intact that the Spanish economy has never been better.<\/p>\n

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

With Impeccable Timing, \u2018Economic Miracle\u2019 in Spain Unravels The European Union on the verge. Since the granddaddy of all housing bubbles popped in Spain between 2008 and 2009, unleashing one of the deepest recessions in living memory, the nation\u2019s public debt has more than doubled, from just over 40% of GDP to almost exactly 100% […]<\/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":[63,195,201,5660,253,279,284,285,353,743,6118],"class_list":["post-20190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-banks","tag-debt","tag-deficit","tag-don-quijones","tag-elections","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-eurozone","tag-gdp","tag-spain","tag-wolf-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20190","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=20190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20191,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20190\/revisions\/20191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}