Saving my Savings

 The banks aren’t what they were. The quill has been exchanged by the keyboard and now there's a button on the street door and a trickster in the manager's office.

My first encounter with a bank was with un corredor - an agent for the Banco Popular. This was the old mayor of Bédar, who used to keep his useful papers, rubber stamp and a modest wad of cash under his bed in a strongbox. One would be granted permission to enter his bedroom and the business would be done, the mayor concentrating as he filled a line in his ledger, and a receipt for the petitioner. Word was, that the books would be transported weekly by donkey to the bank in Lúbrin, a dozen kilometres away.

Back on the coast in Mojácar, we had a proper bank, of sorts, since it wasn’t a bank so much as a savings bank, or caja. These belonged to the Church and in principle they didn’t take commissions. Ours was the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Almería, a kind of low-lender and pawn-shop known to the foreigners affectionately as the Cage of Horrors.

We were treated well there, and at Christmas, the Caja would fulfil tradition by offering their clients a bracer, usually a glass of anís or menta. It probably helped keep their patrons happy.

Later, allied to the Málaga Caja de Ahorros and rebranded as Unicaja, they began to offer sets of crockery to potential customers. A Sterling cheque would take a couple of weeks to clear, but if they knew you…

There was another bank of sorts in the pueblo, the Banco de Jeréz (part of the Rumasa empire), where I kept a company account. The teller, young Marcelo, used to remove a cheque from the back of my chequebook now and again and treat himself to a meal or a bottle of gin or maybe two weeks in the Caribbean until I caught him out one day. The manager returned my missing funds, kind of him, and I don’t know what happened to Marcelo. He’s probably in politics these days. The Banco de Jérez, for its part, went bust in 1992.  So, back to the Unicaja for my banking needs and its occasional welcome drop of anís.

Banks grew in numbers and employees with the building boom, which started the day Franco died and continued until 2008. Then came the ‘restructure’ when 88 different high-street banks shrank down through mergers into the ten we enjoy today, albeit with 23,500 less branches and 115,000 less employees.

As for my favoured banking option with the passage of years, the Unicaja Banco (renamed again) has now joined up with Liberbank (an operator from Asturias, Cantabria and Castilla la Mancha) and, keeping its Unicaja Banco name (sorry about that, Liberbank), has turned into something far removed from its halcyon days as a simple savings bank.

But hey, money talks. Any business one might have is not about making things, or deals, or dingbats, it’s about making money – and who is better placed to make money than a bank? Alright, the Royal Mint I’ll grant you, but after that…

No more bishops behind the door any longer, now they are run by business-folk, or bankers as they call themselves. Indeed, bank staff are now strongly encouraged to sell products to their customers – home and car insurance, health insurance, house alarms (52,03€ per month with CaixaBank and don’t forget to read the small print), investments, Ponzi schemes, crypto-currencies, ostrich farms, precious stones and sundry start-ups while the bank itself invests in property, bicycle teams and volleyball.

If all fails, and there’s the right government in power, then they’ll get bailed out at public expense.

Meanwhile, the Unicaja, having just raised their charges for keeping and investing my modest account to a whopping 20 euros per month, has a sign in our one remaining local office which says that the teller is only there until eleven thirty each morning, and furthermore that (says the sign with satisfaction in a classic piece of Newspeak) ‘Menos es Más’: More is Less, and the handy cashpoint outside now does all kinds of tricks as the disgruntled queue to be found there will happily illustrate.  

A rival lender across town is only open two days a week (Tuesdays and Fridays). How much do they charge customers I ask?

As for mortgages – and some hard-won advice here for the Reader: just don’t.

You may be wondering if my bank still offers a tipple at Christmastime to its patrons. A flute of Bollinger maybe. I’ll get back to you on that one. 

Spain is Beautiful, Mostly

 Spain is a fascinating and beautiful country: indeed, someone once said that it is more like a miniature continent. We have high snowy ranges, deserts, savannahs, lakes, long empty beaches (well, in the winter anyway), cliffs, gorges, rivers, forests and some magnificent city centres.

Those cities are full of nineteenth century buildings: apartment blocks and mansions. They will be close to palaces, cathedrals and monuments to a glorious past. Surrounding them, at just a few stops down on the metro, will be ugly modernist buildings, with frumpy flats equipped with a tiny terrace. It is as if the architects were one day taken by surprise by the accountants.

Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be that many good Spanish architects these days, and while it is one thing to see an apartment block appear to be out of place to the ones next door – as if the designer never came by for a good look – there are some truly horrible creations peppered amongst them. The Corte Inglés in Pamplona plated with tin is a fine example; or the notorious Hotel Algarrobico, abandoned since 2006 (but still not demolished); or the unfinished shells of hotels and apartment blocks, like those in the Canaries; or the ten ugliest buildings in Spain thoughtfully put together by Civitatis, including that odd pyramid thing in down-town Alicante and Santander’s remarkable Festival Palace.  In Almería, the old 19th century building that is the Centro de Arquitectura is encased in glass. Franky, it doesn’t look at all comfy. Nearby, what could only be an architectural prank, we have the council building in Retamar, where the metal skeleton of the edifice is outside: standing a couple of metres out from the walls like scaffolding. I have to look away when I pass it.

Torre de la Rosaleda, Ponferrada

A book called España Fea: El caos urbano, el mayor fracaso de la democracia by Andrés Rubio blames the Franco regime for the cheap housing and the cult of mediocrity which followed the uprising of 1936. Perhaps the better architects all moved abroad.

Spain then, is breathtakingly beautiful, but with some ugly addenda. The coast is all but cemented over with buildings, hotels and campsites. The Government says that it is aware that there are only a few bits left to be urbanised.

On the bright side, even the most humble village has seen some investment: some improvement. Perhaps those who moved to the cities for better or for worse sent some money to fix up the old homestead.

Still and all, it’s not the tower blocks, or the occasional exuberance of a middling architect, or a massive hotel… so much as the apparent indifference to the fate of the remaining Spanish countryside (outside and beyond the huge region of the España Vaciada), and above all, our coastline.

Yet, at the same time – 28% of our land is publicly owned and protected: even (apparently) the bit where the massive Hotel Algarrobico rots gently under the warm sun.

Tax Cuts in Spain

 Lowering taxes is always a popular move, and that’s what the Madrid and Andalucía presidents have done: they lowered the taxes.

This benefited the wealthier residents of these communities more than the poor ones, but there’s a theory (which no one believes except the rich) called trickle-down economics. Give the rich more money and it will find its way, sooner or later, into the pockets of the poor. A joke on the rounds has a version called trickle-down dining, where you pay for the meal of the wealthiest client present, and afterwards he lets you lick his plate.

There are those who think, says an acerbic British commentator over on YouTube, that being poor is a choice.

The pressure on the Spanish Government from the conservatives was clear – with the high inflation, we need to cut our taxes.

Then the Valencia region – a left-wing autonomy – suddenly decided to join in, only, it cut the taxes of the poorer segment of the population.

Following this, and with the stern disapproval of the European Parliament, the Government threw up its hands, and announced tax cuts for the poor – and, what with one thing and another – tax increases for the wealthy.

The president of Andalucía was aghast: ‘Why don’t you leave us alone’, he said to the Government in Madrid as criticism against his tax-breaks for the wealthy arrived with some friendly-fire from the Andalusian spokesperson for Vox of all things – ‘You want to turn Andalucía into Andorra?’ he said (phew!).

Thus, the Government has announced a tax reform that means that everyone who earns less than 21,000 euros per year will pay the same taxes as those below 18,000 were paying. Those who earn less than 15,000 euros (before it was 14,000) will also be exempt from filing the Income Tax return, the IRPF. It also creates a new "solidarity" tax for billionaires who, such as in Madrid or Andalucía, have been forgiven the Wealth Tax. It also raises the personal income tax on high incomes that do not come from salary (i.e., rents and so on) and removes bonuses from large companies so that they pay their share of the Corporation Tax again. ‘These new measures will not affect annual tax returns for 2022, because the existing rules continue to apply until the end of this year’, says Sur in English.

The IVA on feminine hygiene products is also lowered from 10 to 4%.

The squabble between the PP and the PSOE over ‘who and how’, obliged President Sánchez to defend his tax reform against "the sorcerers and champions of fiscal discord who say that money is better in the pockets of citizens". The PP is meanwhile considering bringing the issue of tax increases for the wealthy to the Constitutional Court.

Maybe they’ll let us lick their plate afterwards.