Publications

This year, the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) in Washington were characterized by noise. The biggest concerns remain the impact of tariffs on the economy and on financial assets, especially the dollar.

The communication style of the new US administration—threatening and confusing in equal measure—is causing considerable uncertainty, which may have consequences on the future course of the global economy.

Amid the current environment, uncertainty over the trend in global (mainly) and local economic policy is currently very high, which can have significant and hard to predict consequences on the decisions of households and businesses alike.

With Christmas and the start of the new year nearly upon us, it is always good to look back and review what has happened over the last 12 months. My goal here is to do a mea culpa on where we got things wrong when we laid out our economic scenario a year ago.

As expected, today the ECB lowered interest rates by 25bp and revised down growth and inflation forecasts. Lagarde did not give many clues on the next steps but reaffirmed that the disinflationary process is on track. We maintain four more cuts for the first half of 2025 to 2% (depo).

What does the second coming of Donald Trump mean for the perspectives of the global economy? The truth is it’s very hard to say.

Since the beginning of 2020, the loss of purchasing power, measured by the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), has been almost 20%.

Benefited by falling prices, especially energy ones, and lower interest rates, the Spanish economy is holding up better than expected. The distribution of regional growth is centered on the touristic regions and/or the ones producing high value-added services, which will lead the growth.