sexta-feira, 28 de junho de 2013

terça-feira, 25 de junho de 2013

VARIAÇÕES HOMÓLOGAS
 HOMOLOGOUS CHANGE
Millions of Euros
                     EMPRESAS NÃO FINANCEIRAS        
  Crédito Concedido     Cobrança Duvidosa
                              Installment Credit            Uncertain Collection
  ABR.12 111.127   8.969  
  ABR.13 104.710 -5,77%   11.435 27,49%
Fonte: Boletim Estatístico do Banco de Portugal
Source: Portugal Central Bank
VARIAÇÕES HOMÓLOGAS
 HOMOLOGOUS CHANGE
 
Empréstimos de Outras Instituições Financeiras Monetárias a Particulares  
Loans of Other Monetary Financial Institutions to Private Individuals  
          Milhões de Euros
    Millions of Euros
Crédito   Concedido            Cobrança Duvidosa
Banking Credit            Installment Credit          Uncertain Collection
Habitação ABR.12 112.506     2.212  
Mortgage ABR.13 108.394 -3,65%   2.286 3,35%
Consumo ABR.12 14.373     1.582  
Consumption ABR.13 12.782 -11,07%   1.530 -3,29%
Outros Fins ABR.12 11.406     1.180  
Another Finality ABR.13 10.563 -7,39%   1.322 12,03%
Total ABR.12 138.285     4.975  
Total ABR.13 131.838 -4,66%   5.138 3,28%
   
Fonte: Boletim Estatístico do Banco de Portugal    
Source: Portugal Central Bank

segunda-feira, 17 de junho de 2013

sexta-feira, 14 de junho de 2013

IMF Completes Seventh Review Under an EFF Arrangement with Portugal, Approves €657.47 Million Disbursement

June 12, 2013



The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), completed the seventh review of Portugal’s performance under an economic program supported by a 3-year, SDR 23.742 billion (about €27.19 billion) Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement. The completion of the review enables the immediate disbursement of an amount equivalent to SDR 574 million (about €657.47 million), bringing total disbursements under the EFF arrangement to SDR 19.700 billion (about €22.56 billion).

The Executive Board also approved the authorities’ request for modification of the end-June 2013 performance criteria.

The EFF arrangement, which was approved on May 20, 2011, is part of a cooperative package of financing with the European Union amounting to €78 billion over three years. It entails exceptional access to IMF resources, amounting to 2,306 percent of Portugal’s IMF quota.

 Considerable progress has already been made on fiscal and external adjustment and the structural reform agenda, despite strong headwinds. Market conditions have improved significantly and Portugal has been able to return to capital markets at long maturities. Nonetheless, given the still sizable risks to the outlook, the authorities need to sustain the reform effort to improve competitiveness, boost long-term growth, and further advance fiscal consolidation.

The fiscal targets have been recalibrated to preserve the right balance between consolidation and support for economic growth and employment. However, scope for deviating further from the revised deficit path is limited in view of the elevated medium-term financing needs and debt ratios. Early implementation of the measures identified in the public expenditure review and continued strong implementation of the fiscal structural reform agenda remain imperative to bring public finances back to a sustainable path. The planned corporate income tax reform can also help foster investment and competitiveness, while rebalancing the adjustment mix.

The authorities have a strong track record in preserving financial stability. Progress has been made in strengthening banks’ liquidity and capital buffers, despite a difficult operating environment. Channeling credit to viable firms to support employment and facilitate economic recovery remains an important goal. The Eurosystem has a pivotal role to play in containing credit segmentation and restoring monetary policy transmission.

Further advances with the structural reform agenda are critical to address remaining nominal rigidities in the economy and boost competitiveness and growth. These include further actions to remove bottlenecks to growth, reduce production costs, and minimize rents in network industries.

In addition to strong program implementation, Portugal’s success continues to depend on external support and effective crisis management policies at the euro area level. The envisaged lengthening of the maturities of the EFSF and EFSM loans to support the authorities’ market re-access strategy is a welcome development in this regard.

 

quarta-feira, 12 de junho de 2013

Europe’s Economic Crisis: Unemployment hits Record Highs in Spain, France

According last figures, the number of unemployed workers in Spain and France has reached all-time highs, as Europe’s economic collapse accelerates under the impact of the global economic crisis and austerity measures imposed throughout the continent.

In Spain, the National Statistics Institute (INE) reported that the country had 6,202,700 unemployed workers, the first time in history that over 6 million Spanish workers were jobless. Spain’s unemployment rate rose 1.14 percentage points, to 27.16 percent, as 237,400 jobs were lost. Spanish youth unemployment has reached 57.22 percent.
Fully 3.5 million of Spain’s unemployed workers have been out of work at least one year, and 2 million have been out of work two years or more. The unemployment rate would be even higher if some 280,000 young Spaniards had not left the country to look for jobs in 2012.

Nearly 2 million Spanish households have no job-related income at all, because all family members are out of work.

Since 2008, Spain has lost 4 million jobs, and the unemployment rate has increased by 20 percentage points. Spain’s unemployment rate now stands second among the euro zone countries, just behind that of Greece—whose unemployment rate has risen from 7.7 percent in 2008 to 27.2 percent earlier this year, amid a wave of destructive EU bank bailouts starting in 2009.

In France the number of “Category A” job seekers—those who had not worked at all in the last month—rose to a historic high of 3,224,600. The total number of job seekers registered at the Jobs Pole in France and its overseas departments hit 5 million last month. France’s unemployment rate stands at 10.6 percent, with the youth unemployment rate hitting 25.4 percent at the end of 2012.

The record figures in Spain and France are part of a broad rise in unemployment throughout the EU, centered on countries that have undergone EU bank bailouts since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008.

The EU economy has lost roughly 1.8 million jobs over the last year—leaving a total of 26 million EU citizens, or 12 percent of the work force, without a job. Among other countries hit by EU bailouts, Portugal’s unemployment rate has risen from 14.8 to 17.5 percent, and that of Cyprus from 10 to 14 percent.

The Markit euro zone Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) last figures published, show Europe’s economic decline continuing. The PMI Composite Output Index and Manufacturing figures both came in at 46.5, below the reading of 50 marking the borderline between contraction and growth. For the first time in recent months, PMI figures for Germany, the EU’s leading economic power, also indicated contraction.

Compared to the same period last year, German and Italian new car registrations in the first quarter of 2013 were down 13 percent, while registrations in France fell 14.5 percent.
Mass unemployment is reaching levels seen only during the Great Depression, affecting a majority of youth in Greece and Spain. This is primarily a result of devastating austerity policies and budget cuts imposed by the EU after the initial economic collapse of 2008.

Since then, the Greek economy has contracted over 20 percent and Spain’s economy by 5 percent.
The hemorrhaging of jobs is an irrefutable indication that the hundreds of billions of euros spent on bank bailouts and social cuts in Greece, Spain, France, and other European countries have not gone to fix the economy. Rather, they have helped the European financial aristocracy preserve their wealth by looting the economy, and slashing wages and social services for the working class.

In one recent report, France’s INSEE national statistics institute found that while French living standards fell 0.5 percent from 2009 to 2010 overall, the top 5 percent of the population saw their revenues rise. For the top 1 percent of the population, the increase was a whopping €89,400.
The counterpart to the accumulation of wealth on the summits of bourgeois society was the collapse of masses of working people into misery and forms of deep poverty previously unheard of in Europe. Soup kitchens and charity medical services are now critical to the survival of large sections of the Greek and Spanish populations.

In a recent speech, International Monetary Fund Deputy Managing Director David Lipton pointed to the risk that constant social cuts will draw all of Europe into an economic downward spiral, like what happened in Greece. He said, “The euro area could find itself facing the specter of policy quicksand—in which relentless balance sheet deterioration drags the economy in deeper and blunts the impact of even bold policy adjustment. We saw that scenario play out in Japan over the last 20 years.”

The class interests underlying this policy were bluntly spelled out in a recent interview by EU Commissioner Maria Damanaki. She told Greece’s To Vima radio: “The strategy of the European Commission over the past year and a half or two has been to reduce the labor costs in all European countries, in order to improve the competitiveness of European companies over rivals in Eastern Europe and Asia.”

These interests underlie the defeats inflicted on every attempt by the working class in Europe to shift EU policy since 2009. Protest strikes have been ignored, and industrial action isolated by the union bureaucracy and—where it was found necessary, as in the 2010 strikes of Greek truckers, French oil workers, and Spanish air traffic controllers—smashed by the security forces. The European ruling elites see the impoverishment of the working class as a necessary measure to boost their profits and competitive position on the world stage.

The main fear driving the ruling class is that of rising anger and opposition in the working class. On Monday, European Commission President José Barroso warned that austerity policies had reached “the limit of political and social acceptance.”

Nonetheless, European heads of state are not deviating from the basic framework of austerity. French President François Hollande indicated that no new measures would be taken to deal with the ongoing economic collapse in France: “We will not have growth in 2013. The only way forward is to fully use the measures we have introduced.”

All signs point towards an eruption of class struggles between the workers and the reactionary financial aristocracy throughout Europe.

The EU’s Eurobarometer polling organization recently released a poll that found deep hostility to the EU in six European countries. Some 42 percent of Poles, 53 percent of Italians, 56 percent of Frenchmen, 59 percent of Germans, 69 percent of Britons, and 72 percent of Spaniards said they did not trust the EU as an institution. Together, these countries total over two-thirds of the EU population of 500 million.

Hollande’s poll ratings have collapsed to 26 percent, the lowest ever for a French president in the Fifth Republic, while Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy’s ratings dropped to 19 percent in February.

sexta-feira, 7 de junho de 2013

CONSELHO CONSULTIVO - 7.JUN

          ETV - Diário Económico
              (Author Participation)


http://videos.sapo.pt/U1WD1SqhehZzvy20oTqi