Jaume Guardiola (Barcelona, 1957), president of the Cercle d'Economia, attended this exultant newspaper last Wednesday in an already empty W hotel after one of the annual meetings of the Cercle d'Economia that has been the most eventful in recent years due to the political situation. The result has been good, he underlines, despite the sudden absence of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez.
What is your balance of the days?
In the end, the balance must be made by the members and attendees, who are the ones who can have their opinion. But from what I've been gathering, I think everyone is happy. We have touched on deep topics, such as geopolitics, which help us understand where we are and where we are going.
Has politics played a trick on them?
We had the commotion of the political agenda, which was already complicated by the fact that the elections were held the previous Sunday and which changed the natural order of our daily interventions. Added to this was Monday's news of the electoral advance, which has led us to this last-minute change: the president of the central government could not come and vice-president Nadia Calviño has replaced him. I think it was important to make an impactful Opinion Note, because this strongly influences the debate at the conferences.
And the fact that this year the Circle wanted fewer politicians than in other editions...
At other times many more ministers have come and in this case the basic pieces have come, as it was designed. What is happening is that the situation has turned the meeting into one very focused on politics, but it has been in the corridors and in the interventions of politicians. The other tables have been very focused on the planned topics, I think the partners have taken away a good reflection on the moment in the world.
The sentence of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, against the wealth tax has been widely applauded.
It has been to questions from members and there were several of these. It seems to me that we received about twenty or so questions from the attendees for Feijóo, and among which there was a certain concentration on this topic.
What do you think about the tax?
We are very much in line with this idea that by definition it is an unfair tax, because ultimately you are re-taxing income that has already been paid by inheritance or income. It's a very unique tax, because it's in virtually no geography and therefore leaves you in a weaker competitive position. And in Spain it has the disadvantage, in addition, that you are competing with autonomous communities that have subsidized it 100%. We have criticized it a lot, it is only logical that the members applauded.
The president of the PP has criticized it, but has not committed to changing it either...
Well, open the door.
However, he has received more applause than anyone else.
I think this has happened historically. Opposition leaders have more freedom to speak and are less subject to public scrutiny and may find it easier to garner more applause.
And Vice President Calviño?
He has also made a very good intervention, I think it has coincided very much with the Circle's diagnosis of the famous lost decade. In the sense that the country model we had after joining the euro was an irrational model based on an almost monoculture of residential construction and with a massive relocation of other industries. The brutal effects of the imbalances with which we arrived in 2007 – private debt, trade balance, weight of the real estate sector in the GDP as a whole – exploded with the financial crisis and the bill we paid in terms of productivity and per capita income has been very spectacular
The Circle has spoken out against the electoral advance.
Well, on the contrary, no. It is a power that the Prime Minister has, and he has his reasons for doing so. We make a speech against polarization as an impediment to work on what the country needs, which are agreements to achieve improvements in productivity. And as we're making this speech, we know we're going to have a polarizing few months because it's hard to think that this election isn't more polarized than ever.
And in Catalonia, can we return to the polarization experienced during the process?
I think that sooner or later we will start to see academic papers explaining the economic effects of the process. It is complicated because it is not so much the direct effects but the distractions of investments or things that have not been produced and of which we do not know the effect they would have had. This issue of the process had been appeased and an electoral campaign depending on how it is presented can cause this appeasement to stop. It's an interesting and debatable topic, but we didn't want to get into it, we don't have many references yet and it's very short-term. But yes, we have to follow it closely.
Minister Calviño, also the President of the Generalitat and the Minister of Economy have been very optimistic about the future.
But the gap with Europe keeps growing.
The imbalance, the adjustment and this lost decade have caused this inequality. If your GDP grows a lot, but your GDP per capita doesn't grow, what you end up producing is an accumulation of low-wage jobs, which ends up leading to a lot of immigration. And this also puts a lot of pressure on social services.
What do you think of the new housing law?
We are a bit critical. We find that the law has positive factors such as the generation of public housing stock, some tax incentives for those who rent affordable or social housing. But the incentive is not well placed with respect to how the market works. In the end, if you want to reduce rents, what you have to do is to have more offers. In Catalonia we had a pilot experience that did not work and now we are turning it into a standard for the whole State.
