It was the early 2000s and almost everyone carried in their pocket a small, simple, and robust mobile phone, the Nokia 1100, which became the best-selling mobile phone in history, and still holds that record today. In those days, the Finnish technology company controlled 26% of the global telephony market share and brought to market another device that would mark an entire generation with more than 126 million units sold. It was the Nokia 3310, also known as the "brick" for its reputation for being indestructible in everyday drops.

In the summer of 1980, the Spanish people watched with perplexity the outbreak of what would become one of the most remembered cases of the peninsula's true crime history. We are talking about the murder of the Marquis and Marchioness of Urquijo, an aristocratic couple who were victims of shots from a mysterious figure while they slept in their mansion in Somosaguas (Madrid). We label the killer as mysterious because, although the justice system handed down a sentence and convicted the couple's former son-in-law, the speculations about the participants in the crime have never stopped over the last forty-six years. In fact, the court itself opened the door to various hypotheses when it stated in the sentence that the person who fired was undoubtedly Rafael Escobedo Alday, "alone or in the company of others". This addendum seemed to point to a large number of individuals, all of them members of a grotesque bunch of characters who for years were protagonists in the media: the children of the Marquis and Marchioness, the irascible estate administrator, the effeminate butler, Dick the American (the daughter's second husband), the Marquis of Torrehermosa, or Javier Anastasio de Espona, who is the one we are really interested in.

The banking sector is the protagonist of a good part of the week's appointments. The World Bank has renewed its financial management and the Galician entity Abanca has incorporated a well-known face in Southern European finance to the board of directors of its insurance subsidiary. Outside the banking world, the media tandem formed by streamer Ibai Llanos and former footballer Gerard Piqué enters a new business. At the same time, Just Eat appoints a new financial director for Spain and the OBBIO association renews its board with a new president.

We are entering an election pre-campaign and economic nonsense is skyrocketing. Today I want to talk to you about the general state budget and the destination of our taxes. By the way, these are budgets that have been extended for five years. To begin with, it must be clarified that the items managed by the autonomous communities are not included.

Don't get overwhelmed. We aren't going to talk about out-of-body experiences here, but rather about possible economic leaders for the Spanish government after November 29th. And they don't need to be affiliated with the party. In his first terms, Pedro Sánchez turned to Nadia Calviño, an economist with good contacts in Brussels –where she was a director-general, for example–, who had also held senior positions with Pedro Solbes as minister in the executives of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Once appointed president of the European Investment Bank (EIB), in 2023 she was replaced by Carlos Cuerpo, former secretary-general of the Treasury. With a technical and low-key profile, this doctor of economics does not have a PSOE membership card, like Calviño, and projects a solvent image.

"Pedro Sánchez has not been a social democrat, but a socialist." A high-level former executive of the Ibex-35 summarizes in this way the policy that, in his view, the Spanish government has carried out during this last term regarding the State's relationship with companies, especially those considered strategic. But also regarding economic policy—regulation—over sectors of great weight. An affirmation, however, that would probably be questioned by the parties to the left of the PSOE, particularly Podemos.

Sarfa is the red, white, and orange bus company that travels through the Baix Empordà and connects the Costa Brava with Barcelona. Its centenary brand, founded in 1921 and based in Begur, is absolutely integrated into the daily lives of many residents of the Girona regions. Since 2009, it has been part of the Sabadell-based Moventis group, and this 2026, with 240 employees and a fleet of 130 vehicles, it expects to reach 3.5 million passengers and exceed 11.5 million kilometers traveled. In addition to regular interurban transport, it manages more than fifty school routes, international services to France with BlaBlaCar, and corporate transport. At the head of the company is Christian Busquets, born in Platja d'Aro, who assumed the management on January 1st of this year after joining in 2023 as operations director.

Theater came into the life of Àngels Gonyalons (Barcelona, 1963) almost like a game. “I couldn't quite find what fulfilled me and it was a bit of a coincidence.” She knew she liked theater, that it wasn't considered a good profession, and she took the plunge. In 45 years, she has acted in more than thirty plays and in a dozen television productions.

The housing crisis has acquired a dimension that goes beyond the social and economic sphere, to the point that it has precipitated the early calling of elections. This situation highlights the magnitude of a problem that increasingly conditions the present and future of the country. For too long we have addressed housing mainly as a social issue, which it is, and of great importance. But today it has also become a problem for our companies and their competitiveness, since the difficulty in accessing affordable housing conditions where we can live, but also where we can work, what professional opportunities we can accept, and what capacity companies have to attract and retain talent.

Today, in 2026, a bookstore is not just a bookstore. And a bookseller is much more than a bookseller. There is a commitment, a perspective, an attitude that goes beyond them, that defines them, that makes them become priority cultural and civic agents. The dissemination of ideas, of social concerns and of the citizen's worries embodied in books, surely the greatest and most relevant institution of knowledge that humanity has ever produced. Put like that, it sounds a bit grandiloquent, but, at street level, it is immediately clear. Transparent. You only need to enter Antinous, on Casanova street almost at the corner with Consell de Cent, to realize it. You only need to talk for a while with the siblings Josep and Maria Vitas to see it clearly.

In Barcelona there are some, for example, on Sardenya street, on the Gran Via or on the Passeig de la Zona Franca. In Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, two more establishments in each capital. In total, Aldi has 109 supermarkets spread across Catalonia. The same logo hangs on all of them. But things change if we take a plane and travel to Germany. In Gummersbach, a city in the west of the country, the name no longer appears alone: there are Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd supermarkets separated by only a few kilometers. The same happens in another city, Siegen. In Berlin, on the other hand, all the establishments are Aldi Nord; in Cologne, Aldi Süd. Between one and the other snakes an invisible commercial border that in Germany has come to be known as the Aldi-Äquator, the Aldi equator.

During the Spanish Civil War, a food product began to gain popularity that helped solve the food shortages of households at that time. It was a cube that concentrated meat and vegetable extracts, and it served to make broth with a certain dignity. The manufacturer was called Gallina Blanca (initially, Gallina de Oro) and behind it was the entrepreneur Lluís Carulla Canals, originally from the Conca de Barberà. That was the first success of a great empire that still has gigantic dimensions today, such as Agrolimen (now The GB Foods). But contrary to what many people think, Carulla was not the pioneer of broth cubes, because long before the war, in Catalonia, those manufactured by the Franco-Swiss multinational Maggi could already be purchased normally.

This week we have experienced a top-tier political circus. Like that student who does the assignment on the last day, after having had three months to prepare it, and complains because they failed. Well, the Spanish government has only had eight years.

Two of the main Spanish telecommunications and technology multinationals, Telefónica and Indra, have reformulated their organizational structure this week, which has meant the restructuring of their management teams, while the Catalan pharmaceutical company Kern Pharma has appointed a general manager. Likewise, Airbus has made the appointment –announced last April– of Amparo Moraleda as the new chairwoman of the board of directors, and the German chemical company Covestro, with a significant presence in Catalonia, has announced the arrival of a new general manager in the State.

Catalonia is about to put an end to the anomaly of more than a decade of being practically the only autonomous community without its own chamber of commerce law. A curious differential fact. During this time, stages such as Quim Torra's as president of the Generalitat have been experienced, with an attempt at interventionism that brought unions and employers' associations together against it. Or the most recent controversy over the memberships obtained by large companies by paying (the so-called silver chairs).

Matías Carnero (UGT) is not only the president of the Seat works council, but he is also a member of the Volkswagen Group's supervisory board, the highest control body of the German company. He speaks with ARA in the midst of the consortium's crisis: the group is expected to eliminate up to 100,000 jobs worldwide and significantly reduce its models. The historic Catalan brand Seat could be greatly affected.

It was the year 1948 when the National Institute of Industry (INI), the Italian manufacturer Fiat, and a consortium of Spanish financial entities led by Banco Urquijo agreed to collaborate on the creation of a vehicle plant in Barcelona. Two years later, in 1950, the birth of the Spanish Society of Touring Automobiles (SEAT) would be signed before a notary, which would later become the industrial giant of Catalonia.

Surrounded by a strong smell of liquorice and equipped with gloves and hairnets, operators knead blocks of a tar-black color with an elasticity similar to bread dough. They place them on various trays to let them dry while, in another room, the pastes that have already completed their resting process are rolled and cut into small portions to then be packaged. The image, straddling the scenes of a bakery and those of a pharmaceutical laboratory, is the day-to-day life inside the Juanola lozenge factory, located in Sant Quirze del Vallès (Vallès Occidental). The legendary cough drop brand is celebrating 120 years and is doing so by preserving the essence of its product, while at the same time opening up to new business lines to reinvent itself for the future.

It has been four months since the Fenix Report was released, and something unusual has happened in this country: the conversation has changed. It is not that the data has changed – the data was already there – but rather the way of looking at it. Before May, the phrase "the economy is doing well" meant that GDP was growing. Today, when someone says it, there is always someone else who asks: "And the GDP per capita?" This question, so simple, is what the report has managed to install in the Catalan public debate. And for that alone, it has been worth it.

"We will always be there for Japan". With these words, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, explained his government's intervention at the beginning of August to curb the fall of the yen, the Japanese currency, in the markets. The declaration of support and friendship, however, has been followed by certain tensions between him and the Asian country's Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, as the White House considers that she is not doing enough to stop the decline of her currency.