{"id":19300,"date":"2020-06-23T10:24:16","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T07:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/?p=19300"},"modified":"2020-06-23T02:31:01","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T23:31:01","slug":"spain-weighs-major-boost-to-113-billion-loan-guarantee-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/archives\/19300","title":{"rendered":"Spain Weighs Major Boost to $113 Billion Loan Guarantee Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(Bloomberg) —<\/span><\/section>\n
Spain is weighing plans to significantly increase the size of its 100 billion-euro ($113 billion) loan guarantee fund after the program attracted huge demand from businesses struggling to weather the pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter.<\/span>Officials are considering pledging as much as 50 billion euros in additional guarantees, one person said. Others said the ultimate size depends on how the negotiations unfold. They all spoke on condition of anonymity because the details aren\u2019t public.<\/span><\/p>\n

A spokesman for the Economy Ministry, which oversees the program, declined to comment.<\/span><\/p>\n

The state-backed loan guarantees are a key feature in the global response to the economic fallout from the pandemic. Spain and other European governments have pledged trillions of euros to help keep businesses afloat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s fourth-largest economy had one of the continent\u2019s strictest lockdowns in response to a deadly outbreak of the virus. The economy is also greatly dependent on the floundering tourism industry and its\u00a0long-troubled labor market\u00a0means the jobless rate could spike as high as 24% this year, according to central bank forecasts. In a worst-case-scenario, the Bank of Spain expects the economy to contract\u00a0by as much as 15%\u00a0in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Spain launched its program on March 17, banks have financed around 70 billion euros worth of loans \u2013- about 54 billion of which are state-backed. That\u2019s a much greater deployment of loan guarantees than in other European countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

The loans are funneled through Spain\u2019s Instituto de Credito Official, known as ICO, a state finance agency. Most of the guarantees have been deployed to help finance small and medium-sized companies. Some large businesses have also tapped the program.\u00a0British Airways\u00a0owner\u00a0IAG SA\u00a0borrowed\u00a0around 1 billion euros\u00a0through ICO to help its Spanish units Iberia and Vueling weather the collapse in travel demand.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the event of a default, the Spanish government has pledged to back 80% of a loan to an SME and 70% for a large company.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez first rolled out the program,\u00a0some companies complained\u00a0that banks were requiring them to purchase other products in order to secure financing, something known as cross-selling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other business people said banks required them to personally guarantee the loans, pledging their own homes, for instance. And some executives said the interest rates that banks were charging on the loans was unnecessarily high and not in line with the government\u2019s guidelines.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those complaints from borrowers have, for the most part, quieted down. One reason, according to officials, is that the government has rolled out the program in increments of around 20 billion euros each. That has allowed them to make tweaks along the way, detecting initial problems and then admonishing some banks to avoid cross-selling, for instance, in the following tranche.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spain rolled out\u00a0the final increment\u00a0of the 100 billion euro program last week, accelerating the conversations to bolster the size of one of the country\u2019s most significant responses to the coronavirus crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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(Bloomberg) — Spain is weighing plans to significantly increase the size of its 100 billion-euro ($113 billion) loan guarantee fund after the program attracted huge demand from businesses struggling to weather the pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter.Officials are considering pledging as much as 50 billion euros in additional guarantees, one person said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19303,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19300\/revisions\/19303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}