Spain is one of the European economies that was hardest hit by the COVID-19 virus crisis, in part because of its huge dependence on tourism. In fact, according to figures published in February by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Spain is the OECD country (out of 38) where the real income of families has fallen the most since the pandemic. It is also the EU country that has suffered the biggest fall in per-capital income since 2020, and has been overtaken on this indicator by Slovenia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Now, after years of falling real incomes, millions of families are facing skyrocketing mortgage payments as a result of the European Central Bank’s rapid-fire interest rate hikes.
Blame Game Begins
The blame game has already begun in central government circles. After taking a thrashing in the recent local and regional elections, Pedro Sánchez’s government now faces an uphill slog in next month’s generals. As mortgage costs surge, the government is desperate to pin responsibility on the European Central Bank (ECB) and its Spanish subsidiary, the Bank of Spain. Asked in an interview about the state of the Spanish economy and the potential impact of the ECB’s latest round of interest rate hikes on Spanish homeowners, Spain’s Economy Minister Nadia Calviño said:
“You need to ask [Luis de] Guindos, [Vice President of the European Central Bank], and [Fernando] De Cos [governor of the Bank of Spain]; they are the Spaniards behind the rise in mortgages.”
Calviño is right, of course. So, too, was Sánchez himself when he said on Tuesday that “the [Spanish] Government has no powers over monetary policy.” But his government — like all EU governments — is partially to blame for high inflation due to its ongoing support for sanctions on Russia, Europe’s biggest provider of energy and other vital commodities. This is, without doubt, one of the main drivers behind the massive surge in Europe’s energy prices and overall inflation.
But the mere fact that Spain’s prime minister and economy minister are both trying to shift the burden of responsibility for rising mortgage rates to the central bankers is notable, since senior politicians rarely blame central banks for anything unless they are in a truly tight squeeze. Of course, Sánchez could have added that Spain’s central bank also doesn’t have any meaningful influence over monetary policy in Spain, since Spain’s government handed all decision making powers in that arena to the ECB when it joined the euro at the start of this century.
For Spain, where the consumer price index (CPI) clocked in at a relatively low 3.2% in May, further interest rate hikes are no longer necessary, said Calviño, adding a caveat: the ECB needs to consider Europe “as a whole.” And in the Euro Area as a whole average inflation was 6.1% in May — almost double the rate in Spain. In six countries, all of them in Eastern Europe (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Czechia and Poland), inflation is still above 10%.
The ECB embarked on its current hiking path in July 2022, when it increased its main deposit rate from -0.5% to 0%. Since then it has hiked a further seven times, to the current rate of 3.5%, the highest level since 2001. All of this is apparently necessary to squeeze as much life out of the economy as possible by smothering consumer demand, triggering a recession, destroying millions, with the ostensible goal of bringing down inflation to a more manageable level. This ignores the fact that surging prices are, to a large extent, the result of supply-side factors, including, of course, the boomerang effects of the EU’s 11 sanctions packages against Russia, its biggest energy supplier.
While inflation has indeed fallen, the Euro Area, like the US, still has negative real rates. Meanwhile, the ECB’s rapid rate hikes are triggering all sorts of unpleasant after effects — many of them intended. They include rapidly rising costs for homeowners as mortgage rates surge. Spain is particularly vulnerable to this trend since around three-quarters of its mortgage holders have variable rate loan contracts linked to the ECB’s deposit rate, although they are generally adjusted only once a year.
Housing Bust 2.0?
Spain has already witnessed one of the most spectacular housing booms and busts of this still rather young century. During the peak of the boom phase, from 2003-05, around 700,000 homes were being built per year, more than were being built in Germany, France, Italy and the UK combined, with an aggregate population four times greater than Spain’s. By the time the dust from the subsequent bust had largely settled, in around 2015, over 600,000 families had lost their homes (and bear in mind that in Spain mortgages are recourse, meaning that banks can — and in most cases did — go after the borrower for all outstanding debt once the house is resold).
In recent years banks, builders, large real estate developers and the previous Rajoy government have done everything they can to create a new housing bubble, with a certain degree of success. By 2019 prices in some of the country’s biggest property markets, such as Madrid, Barcelona and some of the coastal and island markets, had regained much but not all of the ground lost in the previous bust. However, in other less desirable markets, home prices had barely risen, and in some they were below where they had been in Q1 2015, when the national low point occurred.
In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Spain’s housing market stalled — as it did in most countries — before picking up pace once again in 2021. In 2022, the total number of residential property sales reached 650,000, their highest level in 15 years.
But that partial recovery is now in serious danger…
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Nick Corbishley 