The event that brought together the current Minister of Economy and three former ministers, held on Monday at the College of Economists of Catalonia, and which this newspaper reported on Tuesday, was a ray of hope due to the common ground expressed by politicians from different parties who can achieve broad majorities.

The first oil crisis, that of 1973-1974, ended up generating, especially in the developed Western world, a situation that was defined as "stagflation", that is, the simultaneity of economic stagnation and inflation. The world had come from a place where the two concepts were quite opposed, given that stagnation was fought with expansionary policies that were inflationary and inflation could be reduced with stabilization policies (i.e., stagnation or contraction). The repetition of expansionary policies simultaneous to the existence of strong supply inflation —the increase in the price of oil was due to unforeseen extra-economic causes—, ended up meaning that economic stimulus policies were useless. Only the same stagnation that was sought to be combated was achieved, but with the addition of inflation.

There was an initial oil crisis. We teach it in all economic history courses. The crisis began in October 1973 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, when Saudi Arabia, leading the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), refused to sell oil to countries that had sided with Israel. OPEC quickly transformed the boycott into price increases. Given the rigidity of global oil demand, OPEC was able to repeat the price increases several times, quadrupling them in just a few months—an impact that spread worldwide and fueled the obscene enrichment of the major exporters.

The succession of globally significant newsworthy events is accelerating. This is the era of Trump, the owner and principal content creator of a social network. The week and a half that has passed since the first bombing of Tehran, in which the top brass of the Iranian regime were killed, has made all the headline news of the previous two frenetic months seem like a distant memory. At the considerable risk of sudden news obsolescence, I venture to offer a few reflections.

This is the fundamental question. The budget project presented by Minister Alícia Romero has the potential to be approved and offers many lures for higher spending to be so. However, the centrality of budgets for a government means that approving them or not is equivalent to a vote of confidence, and there are parties that would approve these budgets but do not want to approve a vote of confidence. To put things in context, I will recall two recent cases. The first is the most immediate precedent: the non-approval of the budgets for the year 2024 presented by Minister Natàlia Mas at the beginning of the same year. They were good budgets, and expansive ones, which clearly stated the political priorities of President Pere Aragonès's government, but they were rejected for political reasons by the Comuns –after an exhausting negotiation between ERC and PSC.

I am surprised that Miquel Puig, with whom I have shared analyses and diagnoses so many times, opposes arguments which he himself has strongly defended.

What has happened to us in recent weeks, from the announcement of a new regional financing model to the commuter rail collapse that will last, at the very least, throughout this year? The short answer is: we have suffered from a large fiscal deficit and poor regional funding. We are paying more attention.

The unemployment figures from the Labor Force Survey for the fourth quarter of 2025 have been released. Everyone is celebrating them as excellent news: unemployment in Spain has fallen below 10%. for the first time in eighteen yearsI reread the news and I wasn't wrong. With all the immigration that has been arriving for years in almost every autonomous community in Spain, the unemployment rate has just fallen below 10%. Data from the previous quarter in other neighboring and comparable economies shows Greece (often the European record holder), 8.2%; Italy, 5.7%; and France, 7.7%. Only South Africa, a world leader for decades, surpasses us among medium-sized/large economies, with 31.9%. In Europe, the Eurozone is at 6.3%; the United Kingdom at 5.1%. In other words, we still have a huge problem with unemployment.

There is a period of mourning following the ambition for independence, first scaled back to the ambition of a special economic agreement in the Basque Country, then to that of a unique financing model, and finally to a reform of the financing model with some unique features. Add to this the explosion of anti-Catalan sentiment throughout Spain against the perceived outcome of a Catalan demand, assuming it would harm them simply because it is Catalan, and suggesting that if the new model were to go ahead, a new PP-Vox government would immediately suspend it—as the "healthy" one has already stated—and continue with the current model. We overcome this mourning and try to coldly analyze the available data, acknowledging that it is still very limited.

The coming year is unsettling. The final days of 2025 were filled with wishes for a happy new year, and we want to believe them more than ever, but a cold analysis of reality is decidedly pessimistic. It's better to prepare for this scenario than to ignore it. Last year, around this same time, we feared the arrival of the new US president. After a year, our worst fears have been realized. We have entered a new world where the three major global powers are led by autocrats or enthusiastic apprentices. The "soft" power of the European Union has proven to be softer than warm butter, while that of the US has become as hard as heavy weaponry. The three powers are on the verge of dissolving the European Union so they can negotiate with each member state and extract the best terms from this area of prosperity: lowering the living standards of its citizens promises to be an immense business for their corporations and their power. We have entered a true dystopia.

A new regulation of the housing market has been approved in the Parliament of Catalonia with the aim of making renting more accessible. The entire regulation exudes the belief that the market belongs to someone who controls it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real estate market and the rental housing market are among the most competitive markets in existence, meaning that the prices agreed upon in transactions are not the result of any position of power on one side, but rather an equilibrium derived from supply and demand. Yes, the dreaded supply and demand, so hated by many, but the most equitable mechanism in competitive markets. So much so that all legislation guaranteeing competition in markets is always seen as consumer protection. Every real estate transaction is based on agreements that are not protected by any monopoly. If someone doesn't want to accept a price, they can go elsewhere to find a lower price. If there is a conflict over a specific location, it means that the dispute is not about a property itself, but about a location. In other words, the parties involved aspire to the small monopoly power that that property represents. Everyone: buyers and sellers. In the real estate market—buying or renting—everyone speculates, since everyone expects a profit. Buyers and renters alike expect a profit. When rent regulation is demanded, it means that many expect a profit, which will come at the expense of another person or company. This is called redistribution, not a market. Let's set aside the term speculateEveryone's a speculator, starting with those who want to influence housing prices through political pressure or regulatory changes. This is textbook speculation: changing the rules to change the price.

Round numbers, like birthdays, captivate us with their certainty. The 50th anniversary of the dictator's death—Franco—holds a mirror up to us, reflecting both successes and failures. The mirror that generates the most unanimity among economists is GDP per capita, seen as a measure of prosperity. We have reliable data to compare the GDP per capita of each of Spain's current autonomous communities in 1975 (they didn't yet exist, but their boundaries were statistically well-defined) and today (2024). In 1975, Catalonia's GDP per capita was 28% above the national average. This was the lowest figure achieved in the entire previous century. The decline was particularly rapid between 1920 and 1930 and between 1960 and 1975. In both cases, in addition to the similar political regime—military dictatorship—there was a very strong wave of immigration. In fact, these were the two largest waves of immigration of the entire 20th century.

It is extraordinarily surprising that people from the younger generations say so many absurd things about the Franco regime, and that some people from the older generations do as well. Is this due to a lack of knowledge? Or to ideologically biased misinformation? If it is due to a lack of knowledge, it should concern us greatly. If it is due to misinformation and ideology, it means that a part of the country, the one most deeply rooted in Francoism, has been busy praising it, while those who should have offered a different perspective have failed to do so. As an economic historian, I will offer a few insights into the economy under Franco, all drawn from the book I co-authored with Xavier Tafunell, Between Empire and Globalization: An Economic History of Contemporary Spain (There are versions in English and Spanish), which we have enriched and updated in various revisions from 2003 to 2021.

Currently, the leading Spanish company by market capitalization, far ahead of the second, is Inditex. Its largest shareholder, Amancio Ortega, is the richest person in Spain and consistently appears on lists of the world's wealthiest individuals. He is now the ninth richest person in the world and the second richest in Europe, although at times he has even been the world's richest. Fifty years ago, Inditex didn't exist, and Amancio Ortega had no fortune whatsoever. This is the most dramatic transformation in the Spanish business world. No other fortune even comes close. The second richest, ten times smaller, belongs to his daughter. Following her are Rafael del Pino (Ferrovial) and Juan Roig (Mercadona).

Recent political and opinion movements surprise us with their questioning of democracy as a political system. We take for granted that democracy is the desirable, normal, and permanent political system once achieved. However, history continually reminds us how vulnerable a democracy is. It is striking to see that the United States—the oldest democracy still in existence—could abolish it. As in enough precedents we know, this could even pass for a democratic decision.

The recent Nobel Prizes in economics have been a succession of gifts to economic history. Three years ago, it was Ben Bernanke, with an enormously influential doctoral thesis on monetary policy during the Great Depression that was the foundation for the expansionary policies that enabled a rapid exit from the Great Recession. This is one of the cases in which the study of the past and its improved understanding have allowed for the deployment of better monetary policies in the present. Bernanke himself was responsible for steering the Federal Reserve through some of its worst moments, minimizing the impact of the crisis and preventing it from becoming a new Great Depression. Two years ago, we had Claudia Goldin, who has studied the improvement of female education in the United States since the 19th century and has been able to document how women entered the labor market, how they achieved improved wages, and why pay inequalities persisted. One year ago, Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, and Simon Johnson welcomed her to explain how institutions are formed and how they affect the prosperity of countries. This year, half of the prize went to Joel Mokyr for explaining the technological prerequisites for sustained economic growth. The other half—Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt—has championed a concept as dynamic and unsettling as "creative destruction," a Schumpeterian concept: another nod to the classics of economic history.

"[...] For having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress." The three laureates have focused their attention on the technological change that leads to sustained economic growth. Joel Mokyr has investigated the conditions that fostered the explosion of creativity and technological innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and that has fueled a continuous flow of innovations ever since. In the early stages—the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century—the decisive factor was the convergence of skilled workers, knowledgeable in their trades and driven to improve the efficiency of their work, and highly educated people—many of whom were aristocrats or descendants of aristocrats—with a passion for observing how things worked. The former deployed what he calls "prescriptive knowledge," and the latter what he calls "propositional knowledge" (we could call it "practical" and "theoretical"), and they paid attention to each other across many societies, of practitioners or of scholars, but all interested in knowing how everything worked and why, or because. The interaction of both types of knowledge was the great "miracle" of knowledge and growth in 18th-century Britain. This is what he has called "the Enlightenment economy," and on which he has published extraordinary books for more than three decades.

Walking through the main streets of pre-Eixample Barcelona can be unpleasant due to its safety, dirt, and neglect. We can understand that the demographic and tourist pressure to which they are exposed makes it difficult to always keep them in perfect condition. What I find incomprehensible is the obsession with hiding their best features and what they represent. Everyone will have walked past the building at the end of La Rambla, going down to the left, whose possible uses have been much discussed. References are always to "the cannon foundry." There's a plaque commemorating it for both citizens and tourists.

The world Trump wants to create shocks us. His speech at the United Nations It will go down in history as a catastrophic milestone. In these circumstances, in which the leader of the world's leading economy and military power is proposing a worldview based on harnessing and expanding the power of the richest and those who are already the most powerful, democracies must react. For those of us in Europe, and in the European Union, it is essential to strive to ensure that unity provides us with the strength to resist the onslaught of Trumpism. However, the European Union is exasperatingly slow, weak, and impotent. Even worse: it is often incomprehensible. The European Union is complicated to understand, in its principles, its rhetoric, and its functioning. It is also frustrating because of the paralysis it leads to due to the principle of unanimity in decision-making. However, we must bear in mind that it is the result of long, complex and often conflicting national histories, and that states are little or not at all willing to cede sovereignty.

The accelerated flow of news should not make us forget the €2.95 billion fine the European Commission imposed on Google (link to the ARA, September 6, 2025) for violating antitrust legislation in the advertising market. It is good news that the Commission is reacting to the monopolistic abuses of large technology platforms, which should not be able to survive in a world—a market economy—where competition is considered a supreme value. In the United States, there are very important precedents for the legally mandated breakup of the oil and telephone monopolies, forcing the introduction of competition. In the European Commission, we owe the pro-competition push in the United Kingdom, which was followed by Jacques Delors, President of the Commission, who leveraged its approach to promote greater integration of the European market and an active competition policy. We economists are quite proud of what has been achieved, and it is excellent news that it remains active. The importance that economists place on a rigorous antitrust policy leads them to consider it the best weapon for distributing monopolistic profits and transferring them to users and companies.