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The savings of Spaniards went from 5,800 euros per household in 2023 to more than 7,000 in 2024. Why has the household savings rate increased and what do we expect for 2025?

In Spain, households have begun to reduce the savings accumulated during the pandemic in order to sustain their consumption levels in an environment of high inflation. The fall in the savings rate has also been reflected in Spanish households’ financial assets.

In these first few months of the year, Spain’s GDP has continued to grow at a significant rate, although the gap between the services and industrial sectors persists. Job creation is gaining traction, while inflation continues to decline, driven by the fall in energy prices. The trade deficit continued to increase in February and residential activity in Spain has had the best start to the year since 2007.

Risk appetite recovers, following the spike in volatility at the beginning of April. However, the divergence between the central banks’ strategies is accentuated. Meanwhile, sovereign yields return, broadly speaking, to the levels of March and the stock markets recover some of the lost ground. Although the dollar is stabilising, it remains weak, and energy prices suffer due to the global uncertainty.

Once domestic demand reflects the effects of the interest rate hikes, the hardest part of the central banks’ work will have been largely completed. The problem is that the markets are already – perhaps precipitously – pricing in an imminent shift in monetary policy.

Between the end of September and the end of February, the US dollar depreciated by 6% in effective nominal terms and by 10% against the euro, trading at close to 1.07, a level not seen for almost a year. We explore what lies behind this change of trend and whether it is likely to continue.

The indicators that have been published during the opening months of the year paint a picture of a buoyant Spanish economy in Q1 2025, albeit with a slightly less vigorous growth rate than in the previous quarter.

We analyse the European manufacturing industry’s import dependency on China and the United States and strategies to reduce it in a more fragmented geopolitical context.

Following a record-breaking 2022, the ECB’s interest rate hikes, coupled with the slower growth in real household disposable income, are expected to weaken the demand for housing.

The strong start to the year introduces some upward bias into the growth forecasts for 2023. Nevertheless, the risk that the second half of the year could be weaker, as the aggressive rate hikes are finally transmitted to the economy, may limit the growth expected for 2024.

The financial markets broadly stabilised during the month of April, as investors' radar moved away from the financial turmoil of March to focus on the growth and inflation outlook, with the publication of GDP data for Q1 2023 and the corporate earnings season.

To date, the investments already approved as part of the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) amount to 12,249 million euros, compared to total planned investments of 16,644 million euros. This represents an approval rate of 74%, which in principle looks promising in terms of getting the most out of the NGEU funds that Portugal will receive up until 2026.

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. 

Is the Trump administration’s strategic shift compatible with the United States’ role as a guarantor of the international economic equilibrium?

The NGEU funds and the national investment programmes in Germany and France are the result of a long process of changes in the big economic blocs, accelerated by COVID and the war in Ukraine. These efforts seek to redefine and adapt production models to the energy transition and digitalisation in a context of uncertainty and new geopolitical dynamics.