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In the last 20 years, the use of digital means of payment has steadily increased in Spain. Card purchases in Spain have gone from around 1 billion transactions in the early 2000s to over 4.5 billion in 2019. But are all generations joining this transition at the same speed?

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a change in consumption habits in our society and has intensified the use of e-commerce. In this article, we analyse whether this intensification has been uniform across all age groups and constant throughout all phases of the pandemic.

The Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, beat Republican Donald Trump in the recent US presidential election. It seems that the Congress will remain divided, with the House of Representatives in Democratic hands and the Senate in Republican hands. In this political environment and with the COVID-19 crisis ever present, what can we expect from US domestic and foreign policy in 2021?

The price of Bitcoin reached 50,000 euros at the end of March, around 10 times more than 12 months ago and 3 times more than the peak reached in December 2017. The 10,000 bitcoins that were paid for two pizzas in 2010 would now be worth some 500 million euros, and the value of all the bitcoins in circulation is approaching 1 trillion euros, a figure that lies between the market capitalisation of Google and Facebook. These are dizzying figures that make us wonder whether we are facing an enormous bubble.

Some people are already warning of the risks of the US economy overheating as a result of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, an idea that is beginning to permeate the financial markets, with strong rallies at the long end of the yield curve.

The recovery will have to face a new hurdle in the short term. While this should not change its trajectory, it could once again cloud the economic landscape over the coming weeks, at least until we have all the necessary information to refine the health and economic policy responses.

We continue to analyse the phenomenon of de-risking among the major economic powers in a new instalment of articles dedicated to international trade and geopolitics. In this first article, we will focus on the United States and China, and in a second edition, on the European Union.

Although our attention will remain focused for a while on geopolitics and all its derivatives, the elephant in the room remains the medium-term implications of AI on macroeconomic variables. The risk is of being overly optimistic, but the tip of the iceberg of this megatrend is promising, considering the initial positive effects on US growth and on the earnings of firms in the sector. 

The US labour market is cooling down. The Fed acknowledges it and the statistics confirm it: the unemployment rate has increased 0.7 pps so far this year and in June job creation hit its lowest levels since 2021. Should we be concerned?

The summer of 2025 – one of relative calm in the financial markets despite the volatility of the macroeconomic environment – has brought with it a change of gear between the Fed and the ECB. While France is emerging as a new source of instability, in the US sovereign rates are adjusting to monetary policy expectations, but they do not seem to fear institutional risk. The stock markets enjoy another month of gains, and among commodities, crude oil remains stable and gold reaches a new high. 

In the context of our revision of the international economic outlook, the aim of this article is to clarify, on the one hand, the US’ current tariff policy and, on the other, to summarise the response from its main trading partners and the state of the ongoing negotiations.