Madrid (EFE) of a variable mortgage, according to a report published this Thursday by the Bank of Spain.
Inflation and interest rates affect Spanish families very differently, depending on their expenses, their saving capacity or the level of indebtedness, which explains why 9% of households can no longer even cover basic expenses with your rent.
In addition, the percentage of households in a “particularly fragile” situation, defined as those that cannot cover essential expenses for more than a month, would exceed 4%. This percentage is substantially higher in families with the lowest income level, where it would reach 17%.
more expensive financing
At the beginning of the year, bank financing has become more expensive, although in the case of mortgages it has become less than expected, adds the Bank of Spain, which indicates that both the availability of credit and the demand on the part of of households, which will foreseeably cause mortgage applications to stop.
And although the loss of purchasing power has been progressively reduced, due to wage increases and greater price stability, even so, the negative impact of the rise in rates on lower-income households is increasingly noticeable.
However, the household savings rate at the beginning of 2023 was above the historical average, the wealth of families has increased and their debt ratio has decreased.
Non-performing loans continued to decline, with a 22.5% year-on-year drop in March, loans under special surveillance -those at risk of defaulting- rebounded since the end of last year, with 18% year-on-year growth in March, which shows a deterioration in the credit quality of loans granted to households.
In the case of companies
In the case of companies, the cost of new financing also rose in the first quarter of the year, this time in the same proportion as in the past and with greater intensity for large companies, since it has risen more in loans above one million.
As in households, access to credit has deteriorated for companies and demand has fallen, mainly due to higher interest rates and lower needs to finance investments.
Corporate turnover continued to rise at a high rate, although the rise in the average cost of debt is beginning to slow down the rise in earnings after interest.
The corporate debt ratio continued to fall, although the financial burden rose slightly.
In this context, the percentage of vulnerable companies decreased in the first quarter of 2023 and returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Non-financial corporations’ non-performing loans continued to decline, falling 14.9% year-on-year in March, 10 percentage points more than a year earlier. The setbacks have been more pronounced in the sectors most affected by the pandemic (16.9%), whose payment capacity has improved, as economic activity recovered after the lifting of mobility restrictions.
Unlike families, loans under special surveillance continued to decline significantly in the case of companies, with a 17.1% drop in March 2023. In the sectors most affected by the pandemic, the decline was more intense ( 28.3%).