Quote Originally Posted by Firn View Post
Spain is not Greece. It is a modern developed economy with a relative strong national and regional institutions which handled its (national) public debt very well for many , many years.
I've read this meme often enough, its popularity seems to stem from Krugman.

No, Spain's fiscal policy has been 100% incompetent and disastrous for a long time. They had faked prosperity and decent budgets like the Greeks, their methods was merely less brazen. They had a huge bubble.
Now either they understood that there was a bubble - then they had horrible policy because they allowed it to grow and blow up.
Or they did not understand there was a bubble - then they were utterly stupid, way below common sense.


This is a country which never got its youth unemployment under control (never below 17%).


I don't get why so many people are so lenient regarding the Spanish and their horrible economic policies whenever the language is English. May it be that the U.S. and London housing bubbles would otherwise create too much cognitive dissonance among anglophones?