The Crisis and Structural Changes to the Spanish Banking Sector: A Comparison with other Financing Systems

Abstract

The grave economic crisis that accompanied the initial financing crisis, whose origin is established in the housing sector in the United States of America, and the following tensions in the European sovereign debt markets, generated important stability and solvency problems in the Spanish banking sector. This environment of profound economic and financing instability constitutes the starting point of this work, that has as its main objective, in the first place, to realize an analysis of the financing reforms adopted by the Spanish authorities since the end of 2008, the moment in which short or medium range steps were implemented to face up to the more immediate consequences of the crisis, until the end of the financing assistance program, and, in the second place, to compare the results obtained with those corresponding to other banking systems that have also received public support.