Expansión reported in this article recently, that Spanish banks had set about buying debt issued by the Kingdom of Spain to «offset the decline in banking business». In other words, lending the money that the ECB is supplying in abundance and at ridiculously low rates to the Spanish government is a piece of cake – a bargain that generates «easy and safe» money.
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The financial situation of countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland (to name a few of the politically correct examples) is unsustainable. And by this we do not merely mean that it cannot sustain itself – in other words, that these economies are insolvent in their own right – but also that it is unfeasible for them to be sustained by third parties, as has become apparent in recent months, with bailouts that are clearly ineffective.
The EU has a glorious past. The project of a United Europe has slowly and flawed but exemplarily overcome the nationalist barriers and reticence of its components. It has been the example of concord and voluntary union of peoples (diverse as they are) who only a generation before were fighting a world war, when the world was limited to being Western and there were only two sides.
It is like being able to concentrate the illnesses of many in a single dying person, bury him and... live the dolce vita again, which is two days. A Machiavellian transfer of insolvencies whose aim is to free the balance sheets of the financial system (banks) whose collapse would have systemic or very harmful effects for the longed-for economic-financial recovery. It is like digging a hole to bury a large accounting hole concentrated in certain entities created ad hoc. Pure «
That fallen tree is none other than the Euro, with its now undisguisable peripheral insolvency, and the communicating vessels of huge amounts of insolvent debt fatally cross-billed by irresponsible politicians. And the «strength» from which the major developed currencies are fleeing must be concentrated in the rising price of 
Bankia’s brand-new chairman, Rodrigo Rato, spoke at the 18th Financial Sector Conference, where he made a joke that was not only unfortunate but also completely unfunny. The economic comparison of Europeans is odious, and on the one hand we lambast those who refer to the EU’s periphery in terms of the PIGS, whilst with the other, the chairmen of Spanish banks publicly recall the old joke: «…a German, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Spaniard are on a plane…» You can see the joke recalled by Rodrigo Rato in the following 
Well then, what Mr Rato sees as an enviable situation – one that would make the British, Italians or French gladly parachute into Spain to enjoy our favourable financial conditions in terms of assets and liabilities – it is clear to everyone that this is nothing more than a distortion resulting from the precarious state of the Spanish financial system. Pure desperation to keep bankrupt balance sheets afloat. Yet according to the chairman of the new bank (formed by merging former savings banks and their toxic assets), the favourable terms offered by our banks are the envy of the rest of Central Europe. Who are they trying to fool? Well, yes, I know, they’re fooling savers who entrust their money to them in all sorts of banking products in exchange for tempting interest rates. But who else? The fact is, their business is kept afloat by the public trust which, paradoxically and surprisingly, they still enjoy. That is why any opportunity, quip or media appearance is a chance to repeat the sole mantra that keeps them afloat: the Spanish financial system is not bankrupt, property prices will not fall any further, and a whole string of well-worn lies.
Because it seems that the Portuguese, the Irish, the Greeks and probably the Spanish take it for granted that bailouts will be provided promptly and efficiently. And we’re willing to accept the impossible – that is, de facto intervention in our domestic economic management – in exchange for being kept in the Eurozone despite being bankrupt. At this stage, we must remember obvious truths such as the fact that the markets wouldn’t give us a penny without the support of ‘Mummy EU’. And it seems that yesterday the Portuguese did not even consider the possibility of being relegated to mere prey for the sharks. How easy (and irresponsible) it is to vote ‘NO’ to tightening the belt when you are convinced that the Seventh Cavalry (in its German version) will come to the rescue.
«The world seems to have gone mad,» a friend remarked to me following the disaster in Japan and NATO’s imminent military intervention in Libya. Indeed, the familiar parameters are turned upside down in every sense: the parameters of the financial system, the concept of risk, ways of preserving wealth, trust, solvency, debt, terrorism, natural disasters, and so on and so forth. But this is not madness; rather, it is a set of new rules, a ‘new normal’ which, for the time being—with no historical cycles to draw upon—seems chaotic to us.