Dear young people

Dear young people and not-so-young people who are camping in the squares or who sympathize with those camping there to demand a right that is being denied to you, the right to have a roof over your heads: I would like to tell you something that you may know, but perhaps not, because the world moves very fast, one news story covers up another, and many of you do not read newspapers. My daughter is 18 years old and, like many of you, she will vote for the first time. Like many of you, she will not inherit any apartment (I would have liked for her to inherit one) but she will have a little more luck than others: she will inherit a half-paid mortgage with a reasonable price. She was born in 2007, which I have often explained (I am rambling willingly and consciously) was the year of the Golden Pig: at the Chinese restaurants where I used to go with my pregnant belly, they told me it was a year “of great luck”.

The luck was that in 2008, as you must have already heard, a very strong crisis occurred (and please accept the verb from me) that we are still dragging along. You were born with this crisis under your arm. But perhaps no one has explained to you that as a consequence of this crisis, it was necessary to “rescue the banks”. Yes, yes. Robin Hood stole from them, but we paid them. Europe invented an acronym that sounds like a frog's croak: FROB. The Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring. It always amused me that it was “orderly”, because look, I imagined it as “debauched”. This restructuring (a pretty word) means that 64 billion euros were injected into the banks. More than half are “lost”. If we divide what was paid by the Spanish population at that time, it comes out to about 1,000 euros per person. Needless to say, if used to build apartments, this money would have solved everyone’s problem.

It is not fair that banks now deny you mortgages without a down payment or charge you very high prices for them. The bank bailout changed the rules of the game irreversibly. You are absolutely right to protest, in a civilized manner, against this world that you found yourselves in as soon as you were born.