Banks saved 3,250 million euros last year by remunerating deposits at a slower rate than expected in response to interest rate rises, according to the Bank of Spain in the latest issue of its Financial Stability Magazine.
The calculation is a theoretical exercise based on a tool known as VAR, which has Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Nobel Prize in Economics, as one of its creators. The model predicts how much the remuneration of deposits should rise in a scenario of a sudden increase in interest rates.
The conclusions of the Bank of Spain is that between the VAR prediction and what actually happened in the period analyzed last year there is a difference of 525 million euros per month on average.
The article does not cite the causes of this delay, but the Bank of Spain itself has done so on other occasions. Among them are the ample liquidity available and the previous scenario, in which deposits came from renting above the price of money, which was negative.
The entities that manage deposits in Spain obtained interest margins of 24,000 million euros in the months analyzed last year. This figure measures the difference between what banks earn from loans and what they pay for deposits, and would have dropped significantly if it weren't for the slow remuneration of savings.
According to the latest data from the Bank of Spain itself, interest on one-year deposits for individuals closed the month of March at an average of 1.36%. However, it is already possible to find entities in the market that offer them at 3%, most of them small. The big banks have not entered into the liability war and are not showing signs of wanting to do so.
The article also shows what the ECB data has been corroborating for some time: the transfer of interest rate increases to deposits has been slower in Spain than in other European countries.
Germany and the Netherlands are among the countries with the highest returns. If in the first two countries interest rates have moved by 41%, in Spain they have barely done so by 17%. German and Dutch banks paid on average between 600 and 1,140 million a month for deposits, compared to 116 million for the Spanish.
