Madrid (EFE) remuneration offered by banks despite the rise in interest rates in the euro area.
In these three autonomous communities, the deposits of households and companies stood at almost 766,000 million euros at the end of 2022, half of the 1,506 trillion that this type of savings totaled, which includes deposits from public administrations and trustees to electronic banking.
According to the latest data by autonomous communities published by the Bank of Spain, most of that billion and a half euros were deposits from “other resident sectors”, that is, households and companies, which had a total of 1.410 billion at the end of the year. past, compared to 1,390 billion the previous year.
Banks are reluctant to remunerate deposits
And all this despite the fact that Spanish entities, a year after the price of money in the euro area began to rise, currently at 3.75%, still resist paying interest in a general way for these products, except for offers punctual, unlike other neighboring countries.
The truth is that Spanish banks saved 3,250 million euros in 2022 alone by not increasing the remuneration of deposits as they did in the past when interest rates rose, according to a study recently published in the Bank’s Financial Stability magazine. from Spain.
According to the experts consulted, this little or no remuneration is the main reason that explains the large withdrawal of funds made in the first quarter of the year by families and companies, which was more than 21,000 million euros and the highest since there records.
Seek profitability or repay mortgage
That money, they add, would have been used to find products with more potential for profitability such as investment funds or public debt, or to pay off mortgages and other credits before they become even more expensive.
But a part of those companies or households with more economic difficulties could also have used that money, accumulated for the most part during the pandemic, for the most current expenses of daily life, such as the shopping basket or rent, due to high inflation in the economy.
However, the most recent data from the Bank of Spain show that this trend stopped in April, as Spanish families contributed 500 million euros to their accounts, after some entities -mainly foreign and a part of those that operate exclusively on the internet- will improve the remuneration of that savings.
La Rioja, at the tail of savings in deposits
Returning to the data by autonomous communities for 2022, households and companies located in Madrid, Catalonia and Andalusia were the ones that accumulated the most deposits in banks, while those who saved the least were residents of La Rioja, less than 10,500 million.
The people of Madrid, with 389,471 million euros in bank deposits, were in the first position in this ranking, although they fell by 5.5% year-on-year.
In second place was Catalonia, with a cushion of 216,059 million euros, some 10,000 million less than a year earlier, while Andalusia, in third position, kept 160,437 million compared to the previous 149,083 million. EFECOM