The book examines the reasons for the crisis, analyzes the government's responses, and draws some lessons from the Spanish experience. The book offers an up-to-date assessment of political and economic issues in Spain.

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This book examines the political roots of banking crises in Spain. It focuses on the process of political bargains in which parties with different interests come together to form coalitions, and it shows how these coalitions have determined banking outcomes and caused banking crises in Spain. In particular, it analyzes the 2008 Spanish banking crisis and shows how Spanish banks and related savings institutions contributed significantly to the challenges that led to the crisis, including the fueling of a large property bubble – by channeling tremendous credits to the construction and real estate sectors, while starving the country’s productive sectors. Accordingly, the book links banking crises to the country’s larger institutional malaise, placing the solution not only in the hands of the banks, but also the political institutions that influence them.

Unexpected Propserity explains how Spain managed to avoid the middle income trap. With an original interpretation of the economic rise of Spain, Calvo-Gonzalez addresses questions about the political economy of reform, the role of industrial and public policy, and the enduring legacy of political violence and conflict.

The financial crisis of 2007–10 has presented a number of key policy challenges for those concerned with the long-term stability of the euro area. It has shown that price stability as provided by the European Central Bank is not enough to guarantee financial stability, and exposed fault lines in governance and deficiencies in the architecture of the financial supervisory and regulatory framework. This book addresses these and other issues, including why the crisis affected some countries more than others, whether the euro is still attractive for new EU states, and what policy changes and structural reforms, both macro and micro, should be undertaken to ensure its future viability. Written by a team of leading academic and central bank economists, the book also includes chapters on the cross-country incidence of the crisis, the Irish crisis and ECB monetary policy during the crisis, and studies on Spain, the Baltics, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The book explores novels, essays and poetry published by Spanish writers in response to the global economic crisis that began in 2008. Spain has been experiencing the crisis in a particularly painful way, and the artistic response to these traumatic events has been powerful and abundant. The literature of the crisis is pointing to the probability that the crisis is not a temporary problem that will be resolved once and for all if correct economic measures are taken. To the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the losses in long-term employment, the growing precariousness of work, the increased economic insecurity, the citizens' disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to withstand the pressures of global capital, the erosion of the welfare state, and the explosive growth in inequality that we associate with the crisis are not likely to be reversed. Spanish artists are exploring the reasons behind Spain's particularly painful experience of the crisis and, at the same time, are placing the suffering that the crisis is causing in Spain within the context of global developments that are ensuring its durability. Essays by Antonio Muñoz Molina and Lucía Etxebarria, novels by Rafael Chirbes, Luis García Montero, Benjamín Prado, and Belén Gopegui, and poetry by the artists who contributed to the collections titled En legítima defensa. Poetas en tiempos de crisis and Marca(da) España. Retrato poético de una sociedad en crisis point to the necessity of expanding our vision of the crisis from the purely financial to a broader definition that will include the changes the crisis augurs for the areas of human existence that lie outside the strictly economic realm.

Contributes to a better understanding of the policy, economic, and legal options of countries struggling with debt problems.