All of us are going to pay out of our own pockets. That is the decision taken unilaterally by the government. Without consultation, without objections, without light or stenographers, without shame. And the fact is that, as the accounting trap that converted the banks' tax credits into assets has gone wrong because the imminent Basel III regulations prohibit such a martingale, now the Government has decided to convert these future tax benefits of the banks directly into assets guaranteed by the State.
50 billion euros - that's nothing - will remain on the balance sheets of Spanish banks as assets, since otherwise Basel III would oblige the tax credits to be counted for what they are, i.e. a potential future and uncertain saving, and only if the bank is still standing after a few years and also makes profits that can amortise these tax credits. (more…)
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Tim Haywood is the chief investment officer and head of the fixed-income division at the asset management firm 
By the spring of 2011, some of us had already realised that we were facing the most complex situation we had ever experienced in the markets, and indeed, 2011 was a a year of misfortune. However, this was not so much due to the results (the markets fell much more sharply in 2008), but rather to unprecedented upheavals in the financial system. That autumn, we wrote an article entitled «