The bank is getting fattened its margins in a very relevant way thanks to the rise in rates. Its intermediation activity is benefiting greatly and, therefore, measures such as the tax on the sector itself are increasingly justified. This is what the Secretary of State for the Economy and Business Support, Gonzalo García Andrés, defended this Monday, who directly accused the banks of obtaining great benefits from monetary tightening.
“Rises in interest rates have widened dIn a very notable way, the intermediation margins of the banking sector and therefore, in general, the banks are confirming the well-founded nature of the government’s measures”, García Andrés stated this Monday after presenting the Margin Observatory.
And it is significant that the Secretary of State wanted to make this direct allusion because banking is not included in that Observatory, although the person in charge of the Economy has pointed out that the Ministry has “other data sources that clearly show” these higher margins. Underlying this point are situations such as increases in mortgages, higher commissions or the refusal of the sector to raise the remuneration of its deposits despite pressure from the Economic Vice President herself, Nadia Calviño.
In that Observatory, on the other hand, there is another sector to which the Government has imposed a special tax: the energetic. And what the work carried out by the Ministry of the Economy, the Treasury and the Bank of Spain says is that there has also been a noticeable increase in margins here.
“The data from the Observatory confirm that the policies adopted by the Government regarding the energy sector, with assessment but not only. Also the regulatory measures to limit these extraordinary benefits, and to make companies and consumers not pay for these extraordinary benefits, are clearly well focused, although they are not,” Calviño’s number two explained.