Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2010, during Spain’s economic crisis, as a personal forecast for 2011 on jobs, taxes, utility prices, unemployment support, home repossessions, the new anti-smoking law and aid for entrepreneurs; these predictions can now be checked against what happened.
In 2011 Spain will finally hit rock bottom. It’s not that I’m glad it will hit bottom, but the only way this country can recover is to get into the eye of the storm once and for all, so that whatever comes after that can only be an improvement.
No new jobs are going to be created, and if a few are, they will be out of all proportion to the jobs that are going to be destroyed. So anyone waiting for the miracle of someone knocking on their door to offer them a job is going to be very disappointed.
The state will carry on with its disproportionate revenue-raising measures, some of them surreal, so the financial situation of a large share of Spaniards will get slightly worse because of taxes and rises in the price of electricity, water and basic goods.
As we have seen, protection for the unemployed is over, so this will be the year that breaks records for home repossessions, which will improve the banks’ real estate business in the medium and long term.
The police and other state security forces will play the biggest role in raising revenue for the state, which will try to clean up the public finances through fines and new laws that benefit nobody except the state itself.
Bars and restaurants will see their sales fall because of the new anti-smoking law, and together with the tax rises, this will lead to a high percentage of these leisure venues closing.
Aid for new entrepreneurs will be minimal, so new projects will have to be financed by private investors. Even so, people with vision and the ability to adapt to change will find ways of doing business by taking advantage of the technological era.
Apparently, 2011 won’t bring any improvement in the economic situation for Spaniards, which doesn’t mean it isn’t a good time to take advantage of certain opportunities and new ways of doing business.
What is clear is that it will be a year of fighting for survival, a time for the smart and the visionary. The good news is that anyone can have a “flash of inspiration” at any given moment.
For investors, the situation hasn’t changed, and they will keep finding incredible opportunities by investing both in the Spanish stock market and in investment products from emerging countries.
Obviously, this is my own personal view and I may be wrong, although honestly, I don’t think you need to be an economist or a guru to see that the situation will be very similar to the one described, or even worse.
As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street 2, more or less: when times are ugly, only the ugly manage to profit.
So happy 2011, and every man for himself.
Featured image: Carlos Quesada Granja, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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