EU: Spanish minister calls on ECB to buy more bonds

A Spanish minister has urged the European Central Bank (ECB) to buy more bonds to slow the country's sovereign debt crisis, amidst fears that Spain will be the next euro member in need of a bail-out.

Jaime Garcia-Lehaz, a deputy minister in Luis de Guindos's economy ministry, said on Friday: "They [the ECB] should step up the purchase of bonds" after the cost of insuring Spain's bonds against default surged to record levels.

Mr Garcia-Legaz added: "If you're demanding ultra-restrictive fiscal policies from Spain and Italy then it makes sense to have monetary policy with stronger bond purchases."

His comments came as ECB officials divided over the best course of action to quell the Spanish economic crisis after new data revealed Spanish bank borrowing from the European Central Bank doubled in March.

While executive board member Benoit Coeure signalled the bank may start buying Spanish bonds, his Dutch colleague Klaas Knot said yesterday that the ECB is "very far" from reactivating a policy that failed to stop a sell-off in Spanish bonds in November.

The clear need for emergency funding triggered renewed turmoil in the financial markets on Friday.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is struggling to convince investors he can get Spain's finances under control

Spain (and others) needs to get out of the Euro as fast as they can and devalue to a new Peseta. They have 20% unemployment, 50% youth unemployment. In order to get people to work, they need to lower labor costs to compete. They can’t lower minimum wage laws, but they can convert to a lower value currency, achieving the same thing.

Hey, why doesn’t the Spanish “government” (bunch of socialists) print money, lots of it? Just like Obama did/does/is/will continue to do ???

When socialists run out of someone else’s money, they must print their own.....

I guess investing their Country's finances in Solar Technology did not quite yield the dividends they promised...
These guys would have been scammed by someone selling them magic beans (which at least they could have turned into frijoles).

Hey, why doesn’t the Spanish “government” (bunch of socialists) print money, lots of it?

Because they signed up to use the EuroMark as their currency. The Germans still get twitchy when you ask them what number to print on the bills after trillions.

The War For Spain

I fully intended to ignore Spain this week. Really, truly I did. I had my letter all planned, but then a few notes drew my attention, and the more I reflected on them, the more I realized that the inflection point that I thought the ECB had pushed down the road for at least a year with their recent €1 trillion LTRO is now rushing toward us much faster than ECB President Draghi had in mind when he launched his massive funding operation.So, we simply must pay attention to what Spain has done this week – which, to my surprise, seems to have escaped the attention of the major media. What we will find may be considered a tipping point when the crisis is analyzed by some future historian. And then we'll get back to some additional details on the US employment situation, starting with a few rather shocking data points. What we'll see is that for most people in the US the employment level has not risen, even as overall employment is up by 2 million jobs since the end of the recession in 2009. And there are a few other interesting items. Are we really going to see 2 billion jobs disappear in the next 30 years?

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