Spain’s Economic and Financial Crisis Develops With The ECB Acting As “Pawnbroker of Last Resort.�

My co-blogger on Global Economy Matters Manuel Alvarez in his post on last weekend’s Spanish election called it “Zapatero’s election to lose”, meaning by this that the opposition scarcely seemed credibly poised to win, and their best chance of victory rested on the possibility that Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero might somehow or other manage to clutch defeat straight out of the jaws of victory (aka throw the election away). In the event he didn’t, and the Partido Popular now face another 4 years sitting it out on the opposition benches. But there is another sense in which one might think that this was Zapatero’s election to lose, and that is connected with the scale and importance of the economic problems which are steadily arriving on the Spanish centre stage, since given the scale of what now seems to be happening in Spain I find it hard to understand how anyone would actually be able to relish having won ...