(ANSAmed) - ROME - The effects of the economic crisis are weighing ever more heavily on Spanish citizens. The high unemployment rate is only the most visible part of the situation in a country in which families have begun to lack liquidity. Payments are left unpaid, and many (159 cases every day) are losing the houses that they bought in the years of plenty through a mortgage that proved overly easy to get. A million people others have found themselves with their bank accounts dry after having invested unknowingly in ''high risk financial products''. In the capital, police are meeting with an alarming increase in petty theft: theft due to hunger. According to the figures published by Spain's Economic and Social Council, one out of every four families is living on the threshold of poverty. first consequences are on payments like loans and mortgages, notes the National Statistics Institute. Compared with 2011, the families and small businesses no longer able to pay back loans have risen by 8.9%. Raising the alarm was the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas, PAH). An organisation created in Catalonia four years ago, it forcefully opposes evictions. In 82% of the cases, the national media quote PAH as noting, the evictions are of families with dependent children and without any alternative residence. While one tries to avoid imaging the type of ''corralito'' imposed in Argentina in 2001 (the impossibility to withdraw money from accounts in dollars, Ed.), almost a million people have their savings blocked in Spanish banks. Ninety-five per cent of them are over age 60, according to the Banks, Cajas and Insurance Users Association (AIDCAE). Their mistake was to have bought "participaciones preferentes", bonds issued mostly by savings and loans institutes but without a liquidity guarantee and which above all do not pay any interest if the profit is not making a profit. It is a ''complex, high-risk financial product'', according to the prospectus which since 2009 has been given to those investing their savings. And it is a product which, with the crisis, banks are not able to resell. Economy Minister Luis de Guindos himself has said that ''these types of shares should never have been offered to small savers''. However, not far from Las Cortes (the Spanish Parliament) in the streets of Madrid the spectre of hunger has begun to make inroads. Although no official figures are available, both government representatives in Madrid and the national police have no doubts about the matter: ''since the beginning of the crisis, we have had to mobilise more police to keep petty theft under control - theft for reasons of hunger, and especially seen in supermarkets''.Crisis: Spain suffering, debts and thefts rising steadily
Almost 160 houses distrained daily, bank accounts drying up
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
A million Spanish people have found themselves with their bank accounts dry after having invested unknowingly in ''high risk financial products''
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