Economy
Fernando del Pino on Business and Investing in Spain and Beyond
We recently had the privilege of interviewing Fernando del Pino for the second time. Our first exclusive conversation took place in early 2014, ( it is reprinted a bit later in this issue)…
Banal technology, the obese State and low productivity
We live in an era of technological intoxication, in which we all bow down in fascination before the Golden Calf of new technologies. However, we ought to ask ourselves an unpleasant question: are all these technological advances really productive? Why it is, then, that productivity growth has slowed down in developed countries? Given that time …
READ MORE >>Banal technology, the obese State and low productivity
The true cost of the Welfare State
Do you happen to know, dear reader, which proportion of your hard-earned income is eaten up by the State’s Leviathan if you add all the direct and indirect taxes that you pay throughout the year? Welfare States follow two essential rules: the first is to conceal the true level of taxation it obtains from plundering …
Crushed under debt: lessons from a desert island
In the last eight years US public debt has doubled in dollar terms. In Spain, public debt has roughly increased from 40% to 100% of GDP during the same period while the sum of public and private non-financial debt has climbed to 250% of GDP (versus 155% twenty years ago). Both are nice examples of …
READ MORE >>Crushed under debt: lessons from a desert island
Indispensable reforms: playing Cassandra (part II)
As I wrote in my previous article, when the Transition to democracy took place in Spain in 1975, the unemployment rate was 5% and the standard of living had grown by a factor of four in a single generation as a result of the country’s huge (though fragile) economic growth between 1950 and 1974 (a …
READ MORE >>Indispensable reforms: playing Cassandra (part II)
Playing Cassandra: a course on reality
I witness, in some degree of amazement, how our government officials appear to be immersed in a binge of mutual congratulation and merry back-slapping in the belief that the crisis has run its course, mistaking the manna delivered by the ECB and the nerve-strained inflows of investment funds (which come and go in the blink …
Destructive monetary policies
We are living in an era of economies intervened by central bankers who have been raised to the level of magicians or even gods of Olympus: infallible, clairvoyant and beneficent. Unfortunately nobody whispers in their ear, while holding up the laurel crown, that they are nothing but men. To be fair, at the worst moment …
Spain, drifting rudderless
Spain’s current situation is extremely worrying. The problem is not that we still don’t have a new government two months after the last elections. In this Welfare State that drags us toward a disguised totalitarian system, to govern and to legislate are considered synonyms, and to legislate is understood as enslaving the citizens with an …
The Five Experiments: A short essay
When I was kindly invited by our founder to make a presentation in our first meeting, I thought it would be interesting to bring out some global views on what I believe is a multi-generational decline of the Western civilization rather than talking about the very interesting but narrower field of investment…