Spanish households reach the coronavirus crisis in a much better financial situation than they did in the global recession of 2008. Although this does not mean that, at the end of 2019, families continued to bear higher debt on their domestic balance. to 761,000 million euros with financial institutions. On average, 40,900 euros per household.

Families have taken advantage of the last decade to amortize mortgages and only in recent years has growth in loans been observed in a specific sector: consumption. Here family debts have increased sharply -with rates above 15% at times-, and today they represent around 28% of domestic liabilities, according to statistics published by the Bank of Spain.

In addition to reducing debts continuously and without pause since June 2008, families have been gradually recovering purchasing power and increasing their investments in stocks, insurance or investment funds in line with the reduction in the unemployment rate and the slight recovery of wages in some sectors.

This has led to financial assets in the hands of households increasing by 18% since 2013, when he left the last recession and entered a growth cycle that has lasted until now. Behind this improvement is the revaluation of stocks and investment funds, which has now vanished with the bump of the Stock Exchanges.

The supervisor's statistics reflect how in the last seven years cash or deposits have increased by barely 7.8%, while the value of their shares and funds has increased by 64%. Eight times more.

By component, the bulk of households' financial assets was in cash and deposits (38% of the total) , followed by equity participations (28%), insurance and pension funds (16%) and participations in investment funds (14%) ", explains the financial supervisor.

Part of the wealth invested in capital instruments has vanished so far in 2020. According to Inverco statistics, the wealth invested in investment funds has decreased by 29.089 million euros so far this year, 10.5 %. Of this figure, only in the month of March there were withdrawals of money amounting to 2,232 million euros.

Another troubling statistic of the Bank of Spain is the one that refers to credits whose maturity is in the short term, that is, in a period of less than 12 months. These loans increased 9.1% in the last year due to the increase in consumption in recent years.

It will be here where, predictably, financial sources explain, the first defaults by families will occur in the coming months, although the Government has also chosen to cover their payment with a moratorium for those affected by the coronavirus crisis. In total there are 32,241 million euros that mature in 12 months.

The financial consolidation carried out by households and companies since 2008 has not been correlated with the evolution of debt in the Public Administration. The former have managed to lower their liabilities in relation to GDP from 180% to 129%, while in the case of public debt the evolution has been the opposite: going from 40% to 95% in 11 years.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • saving and consumption
  • Mortgages
  • Crisis
  • Macroeconomy
  • economía
  • Coronavirus
  • Covid 19

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