I do not see clearly the reasons for a tax on banking. Without any particular sympathy with the financial sector, I do not believe that in any case its situation is similar to that of other sectors that are profiting, such as the electricity sector, from the energy situation. Here yes, as a protected sector, it is benefiting in a homogeneous and continuous manner from windfall profits, without apparent cause of its own merit, improvement in productivity, supply conditions or more. efficiency in cost control. Much of the windfall profit comes from captive demand that has very inelastic consumption in prices.
When it comes to taxing banks, someone can argue that it is about recovering, at the first opportunity, part of the public aid that it received with the financial crisis. But these are half truths: savings banks more than banks, and not homogeneously, were the main beneficiaries of aid. Indeed, and contrary to other protected sectors, here we do find shareholders who have lost everything.
The uniform tax therefore does not seem logical, nor does it seem to be the best fiscal way to recover those resources; better regulate the type and commissions, according to what citizens pay, it would be a better option for the Government to make money. We'll see the final impact of who ends up paying the tax! We also note that the transfer of the tax to prices, from a factual point of view, is easier to control with the price of energy, instead of monitoring the entire basket of paths that banks have to recover from this fiscal penalty.
It does not seem too rigorous either that a prime minister says that if this measure bothers Mrs. Botín, it means that "we are doing well". That is an unbecoming street comment from a president. Part of the profits of BBVA and Santander come from outside the country (today, more than half); certainly, some high figures of which people do not know the bases of the reference capital to value them in fair terms of percentages and not in absolute values. In short, the line of the argument since sixty billion in aid received with the financial crisis does not seem robust enough to me: the distribution was not equal, and the savings banks (our savings) were the main beneficiaries (no depositor lost money, unlike of the shareholders).
More significant has been the aid received from the European Central Bank, but this is more a European than a state argument, and from the Government through the ICO due to the covid that has served to keep many companies alive. The first aid from the ECB has been through the third TLTRO program, which has allowed many banks to take money (charging 1%) and deposit it in the ECB itself (paying 0.5%). With this conservative strategy, the banks would have earned 1,450 million euros a year, a figure very similar to what the Government intends to collect annually with the new tax. In addition, also due to the pandemic, the Executive approved, very correctly, several lines of guarantees that covered up to 80% of certain loans and credits granted by banks to companies. Taking advantage of this guarantee, more than one million operations were granted to more than 600,000 companies for a total of almost 125,000 million euros, ensuring the viability of many companies. Acknowledging that it has been worth it, without a doubt, it must be said that the banks have also been partially favored in two ways. First, because these high-risk loans have prevented defaults on other loans previously granted by banks, and second, because these loans have generated new business for banks with limited risk.
To finish, we must analyze possible negative impacts of this new tax. From the point of view of the stability of the financial system and of solvency, it does not seem that the target collection figure could put the solvency of Spanish banks in difficulty, although during the next two years (the expected validity of the tax) were an economic recession to occur with severe effects (significant increase in bad debts, devaluation of the sovereign debt portfolio, increased costs due to inflation, etc.), this new tax cost would not help at all. From a credit provision perspective, contrary to what some of the banking representatives are now saying, who are understandably angry, no problem is foreseen, given the comfortable liquidity situation of the banks and the need they have to generate business ; the problems could come, perhaps, from the deterioration of the finances of companies and families. A more reasoned and comprehensive acceptance of the safe tax would have improved the image of the banks, today deteriorated for many reasons, both personal treatment and transparency, with some that have even suffered legal convictions, in the face of a certain passivity of the regulator.
