New semester of green numbers for CaixaBank, which has closed the first six months of 2026 with a net profit of 3,203 million euros, 8.5% more than in the same period last year. This was detailed this Wednesday by the company's CEO, Gonzalo Gortázar, during the presentation of the entity's results held in Valencia.

During 2025, Catalans filed 4,798 complaints with the Bank of Spain. The figure – representing 15.4% of the total claims made in the State – is 55% lower than the claims made a year earlier, in 2024. This sharp decrease returns the statistics to their usual pace: as the Bank of Spain explained this Tuesday, 2024 was a year of "extraordinary" activity due to the Supreme Court's ruling on undue mortgage expenses.

In Europe, as always, we love to legislate. One of the latest regulations to come into force, on July 1st, is the obligation to have the MiCA license (an EU authorization) to operate with cryptocurrencies in European territory. Until that date, there were about 3,000 companies that allowed buying, selling, and custody of cryptocurrencies. However, only 210 have obtained the license and only 14 have it fully operational. In practice, how does this affect us?

The European regulation of cryptocurrencies, known as the MiCA regulation, has reshaped the digital asset landscape on the continent. Far from the wild west that had dominated the early years of the industry, Brussels has managed to put fences around the field. To the point that the major player in the market, the giant Binance, has not been able to acquire the community permit to operate in the EU, and retired on July 1st. The new framework imposed by the European Commission aims to offer security to investors, and part of the sector crypto has taken the regulation as a business loophole. Catalonia is proof of this: the first cryptocurrency platform created in the country, Venga, received the MiCA license last week to operate in the region with a model far removed from the market's image. "We are an app for people who are new to the space. We built it from scratch so you can enter it easily," explains the company's executive director, Michael Stroev, in conversation with the "Companies.

Buying a flat is a decision made after crunching numbers and more numbers and weighing multiple variables. Among them, the money the buyer will have to disburse when the transaction materializes, which causes more than one or two headaches.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has urged the main financial institutions in the euro area to present "by October 31, 2026" a comprehensive action plan with concrete measures to address cybersecurity threats related to cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as Mythos, developed by Anthropic.

In the Anglo-Saxon language it is common for the names of major commercial brands to become verbs and become part of popular slang, even being accepted as dictionary definitions. Googling or tweeting are just two examples of a practice much less common in Romance languages. But a few years ago, a concept has been fully integrated into the daily lives of most Catalans. Doing a Bizum is an expression that already sounds familiar and refers to a project that academics and financial sector sources consider an "exceptional" success story in the Spanish banking sector.

The North American investment multinational Blackstone has limited the withdrawal of money from investors in its main private credit fund following a surge in investment liquidations. This is another case of massive money withdrawals from an investment vehicle dedicated to private credit, a branch of the financial industry that has been showing problems in recent months in the United States, where it operates as a shadow banking sector. shadow banking.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has once again warned of the financial dangers of the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, which is growing very rapidly, especially in the United States. In a report, the European monetary institution warns that large AI multinationals may be overvalued and could cause problems in the eurozone's financial sector.

The concern in the United States financial industry about the viability of some private credit investment funds has led Wall Street's major banks to bet on financial instruments that either cover losses in case of fund failure or allow for downside speculation. Major North American financial institutions have created a public index in recent weeks that allows investors to know the price of these new speculative instruments.

The magazine Time The February 15, 1999, issue of the magazine featured three men on its cover with a condescending air and the headline "The Committee to Save the World." In the center, Alan Greenspan, then the all-powerful chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed, the US central bank), appeared surrounded by US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy, Lawrence "Larry" Summers. The magazine highlighted the three economists' role in managing the recent financial crises in Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Russia. That cover served as a springboard for Summers, the least known of the three. In July of that same year, 1999, he replaced Rubin as head of the Treasury (equivalent to the Ministry of Economy) and for many years was one of the most respected economists in the US, where he stood out as one of the architects of the Democratic Party's neoliberal shift: he was a staunch advocate of financial deregulation, free trade, and free markets.

Michael Burry tweets infrequently, speaks even less, and is rarely seen in public, but when he does, it's for a reason. And this week he decided to make his stance against artificial intelligence public.

This week was Financial Literacy Day. The headline? In Spain, it's low compared to other European countries, especially the Nordic countries. Financial literacy is measured based on knowledge of three key concepts: compound interest, inflation, and risk diversification. It's not just about knowing how to define them, but also knowing how to incorporate them into everyday decisions. People who are familiar with these concepts tend to have an emergency fund, save more for retirement, and make better decisions.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump He denied in a press conference that he planned to fire Jerome Powell., the chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed, the US central bank). That same morning, several media outlets such as Bloomberg and The New York Times They had published that Trump had a draft letter to send to Congress to oust Powell, which led to an immediate drop in the dollar on the foreign exchange market and put the US stock market in the red. Only with the president's denial, a few minutes after its publication, did the situation in the markets normalize.

Barcelona and Madrid have been suffering from a housing bubble for two years, according to a new study. The causes include several factors, from population growth due to the arrival of immigration and the lack of public and private housing construction to the cheapening of credit and the entry of speculative investors.

In May 2019, the real estate agency California Outdoor Properties added a luxury property to its portfolio for $6.4 million. It was a luxury ranch located in Pescadero, a small town on the California coast with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. The plot covered 75 acres of wooded land, three catfish ponds, a stream surrounded by willows, green fields stretching to the horizon, and a majestic European-style house crowned by a terraced tower. The property boasts four bedrooms with panoramic windows, six bathrooms, a library, and an office. It was the house where Dee Hock lived for over twenty years when she decided to live a quieter life. Perhaps this name doesn't mean anything to you, but it's the reason why you carry a credit or debit card with a specific logo in your wallet today: Visa. Who was he, and how did he create this global financial giant?

Luis de Guindos, currently Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB), was the first Minister of Economy who, with the 2007 Competition Law in hand, decided in 2012 to submit a takeover bid to the Council of Ministers, citing reasons of public interest. This involved the acquisition of La Sexta by Antena 3. He was the only minister of his rank who could claim that honor until Tuesday afternoon, when the current Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, decided to do the same in the case of BBVA's hostile takeover bid for Banc Sabadell.

It was the great economic upheaval in Catalonia in 2024 and, no matter how it turns out, it will be one of the big news stories of 2025. BBVA's takeover bid for Banc Sabadell, which poses an existential threat to Catalonia's fourth-largest company, is a story that has followed ARA readers for the past twelve months.Companies We wanted to take a chronological look at this hectic year, looking at our readers' comments. This is the movie of the year as you saw it.

The Stock market crash in response to tariffs imposed by the White House In most countries around the world, the impact is very different in the United States than in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, stock markets play quite different roles within the economy: in the US, they are a key element, both for the business sector and for families, while in Europe, they play a more secondary role.

The big economic difference between the United States and Europe lies in the way savers prepare for their retirement. In the United States, they buy stocks on the stock market, while in Europe, they entrust everything to their governments.