The president of CaixaBank, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, has requested today in Spain a “plan to redirect our public accounts” after “the effort made by the pandemic”. The banker recalled that “Spain continues to maintain very high debt to GDP ratios, and a structural deficit close to 4% which, on the other hand, has not been able to be corrected at any time in the last decade.” He said this during the speech he gave at the CaixaBank General Shareholders’ Meeting that is being held today in Alicante, where the bank’s headquarters are located.
In his opinion, this situation occurs in an environment in which “we are witnessing a normalization of interest rate levels, compared to the exceptional conditions we have had in recent years.” His forecast is that depending on what the market is discounting, the ECB (European Central Bank) deposit rate will be around 3.25%. This rate is currently at 3% and the general ECB rate at 3.5%. The rate estimates would leave the Euribor at a “maximum of the order of 3.5% in the second and third quarters of this year”. Currently the Euribor is around 3.5%.
Regarding the financial turbulence of recent weeks, Goirigolzarri has called for “accelerating the creation of the European deposit guarantee fund as a means to avoid possible feedback between banking risk and
sovereign risk, which, ultimately, was the objective of the Union”. Regarding the Spanish economy, the Chairman of CaixaBank stressed that “productivity is, in my opinion, the main weak point of the Spanish economy. Chronic low productivity that can only be addressed with
policies from the supply side.
