Good morning!
How is your week going? Today is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. It seems like a joke that with all the progress humanity has made over the last 50 years, we still have embarrassing levels of misery in Spain. But the reality is that huge sums of capital are being moved, billions of euros flowing through our country in search of the new holy grail of investment.
In this sense, I recommend that you read the article by businesswoman María Álvarez on the next coming crisis. Álvarez describes how, since 2000, technology has become the investment center of the financial world, without productivity increasing, looking for the last blow that will allow this system to advance in its most unbridled version of greed .
Among these expected successes is Artificial Intelligence (AI). An example: OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, closed the largest venture capital funding round in history with 6.6 billion. We are talking about a company that was created without profit but whose surge of capital caused most of its founders to disappear.
Álvarez recalls in his article how an investment bank like Goldman Sachs claims that AI will not bring a trillion-dollar investment, which is expected, even if the consequences remain to be defined and can be dangerous. For this reason, the most powerful American AI companies are starting to leave the EU without new programs with the threat that if it does not relax its regulations, it will see “how the rest of the world relies on technologies that Europeans will not have access to. »
And it is in this context that Spain can fully enter as a service company. Among other things, because AI needs a much larger data infrastructure than currently exists to function and data centers are becoming the new panacea for the economy. Spain is consolidating itself as an “emerging” market for data centers and receiving multi-million dollar investments beyond technology companies.
From the investment fund Blackstone, the largest owner of rental housing in Spain, which announced an investment of 7.5 billion in this sector in Aragon, where Amazon is already expected to invest 15.7 billion to expand its network of data centers or the 6 billion raised by Microsoft.
There is a new fever among billions of people seeking how to become leaders of the next digital breakthrough. According to Linklaters, 40% of investments by the world’s top 50 real estate funds are already dedicated to building data centers.
In this tidal wave, a group of Spanish companies does not want to be left behind, which is why Iberdrola or companies like El Corte Inglés or ACS are looking for their place in the new windfall. Here we tell you about the new investment fever for data centers in Spain.
It is true that digital infrastructures are necessary to channel the growing need for technological demand for data, but it remains to be seen that this shower of millions does not trigger a new bubble in a sector that we already know is not very ecological.
Another sector that is evolving at high speed is the automobile industry. We are not only talking about the gradual, too slow, transition from thermal cars to electric vehicles, where Europe has not yet found its place in a cocktail mixing falling sales, doubts about customs tariffs on Chinese electric cars and layoffs. The transformation is much deeper. Among other things, because it seems that buying a car is no longer a priority and more and more drivers are opting for other types of alternatives to purchasing: rental, hourly rental or subscription . In this way, it is not strange that some car manufacturers find themselves involved in a perfect storm: Volkswagen, Mercedes and Stellantis, owner of Opel, Peugeot and Fiat, suddenly stop their activities.
The data
This is the increase in food prices in September, according to the INE. With this seven-tenths drop in food inflation year-on-year, statistics confirmed that the general CPI was reduced to 1.5% last month. It seems that the pressure on prices is no longer as strong. Even large consumer companies predict a drop in food prices in the coming months, but they do so with crocodile tears: complaining that “the legislative environment is unbearable”, that the reduction in working hours “will destroy competitiveness” or that they have been “accused in recent years” for high prices, while admitting that “food inflation at normal levels is 1.2%”. It should be remembered that in March 2023, for example, food prices increased by 16.6%, that olive oil is still 60% more expensive or how it has affected changes in consumption habits of the food basket, to see if now the. the blame will fall on the citizens.
The graph
The demonstration that we experienced in Madrid to affirm that “housing is not a business” is still ongoing, in which thousands of people participated with a clear role of housing groups that oppose the “rentier system “. We have had enough of a situation which is getting worse month by month and which is forcing more than a million families to make an excessive effort to meet the cost of a roof, but there are also proposed solutions. : rent control, ban on evictions and rent limitation. As you can see from the graph, housing intermediaries increased their profits by 53% while they only increased employment by 2%, proof that brick is another financial asset. It is clear that the problem is serious. Even the Bank of Spain supports increasing the stock of public rental housing in the face of “the current rigidity of supply”. The coalition government approved two days after the demonstration an allocation of 200 million for the youth rent bonus. This is a controversial measure, because experts emphasize that direct housing aid has an inflationary effect, but they doubt the impact of this measure whose supply is limited, in addition to the difficulties of processing and which only affects 0.6% of young people.
Every time he speaks, the bread rises
The classification of ERTE as unjustified is a necessary declaration of the settlement reached with the unions in the collective dispute. This is not to say that the difficult decision to apply an ERTE was taken lightly, far from it.
Spokesperson for the Samu Foundation
The SAMU Foundation is dedicated to tenders for public services for the reception of migrant minors, the disabled and other social services in Andalusia, the Community of Madrid or the Canary Islands. It seems like an exemplary entity, but even in organizations dedicated to good causes, despicable actions can be found. The SAMU Foundation recognized before the National Court the application of a fraudulent temporary employment regulation file (ERTE) to some 300 workers to avoid being judged, following the collective dispute trial presented by CCOO, UGT and CGT. The Labor Inspectorate had already confirmed the irregularity of the procedure. You can read here how a foundation with multiple public contracts withdraws a fraudulent ERTE from 300 employees to avoid going to court.
Entrepreneur
This week we have some top entrepreneurs. We have José Elías, who appears to be the savior of the OHLA construction company, although he is of modest origins, he sells lunches for 3,000 euros where he gives investment advice and praises his success on the networks and on television. Among its companies are the energy company Audax and the frozen food company La Sirena. He never stops distributing slogans to entrepreneurs, even if he does not hesitate to deceive to win customers. Here we tell you who José Elías is, the “influencer” on the Forbes list who goes to the limits.
Another “entrepreneur”, although very different, is Alfredo Pulgar, IT manager of the Tax Agency of Castile and León until 2016. Pulgar violated the regulations on incompatibilities with an aggregates company from Palencia with which he was convicted of fraud. In the newspaper’s archives, there is still an article from February 2011 about Pulgar’s participation in an Internet conference as “an ally of companies in complying with their tax obligations.” In 2018, his own house would end up imposing a fine of 19,669.6 euros on him for personal income tax from 2012 to 2014. The liquidation was confirmed in January 2023 by the Litigation Chamber of the High Court of Justice of Valladolid. A crack. In this link you have more information about the suspension of a former head of the Tax Agency convicted of fraud and sanctioned for fraud.
Public good
How is it possible that at this stage the actions of pedophiles on social networks cannot be limited? TikTok knew that 15-year-old girls were stripping live in front of adults for money. The information was revealed following a leak of internal documentation from the social network created in China to which NPR, American public radio, had access. The documents confirm that TikTok management discovered that a “significant” number of adults were taking advantage of the platform to send direct messages to minors in order to get them to take their clothes off live. TikTok’s internal analysis revealed that in a single month, one million “gifts” were sent to minors via the app’s virtual currency, intended for these types of “transactions.” It is not the only social network where this type of abuse occurs: Arturo Béjar, former engineer of Meta, revealed in an interview with elDiario.es that the company’s managers were aware of the lack of protection for minors : “A third of teens on Instagram have experienced sexual harassment in the past month. Additionally, TikTok’s own report noted that the social network was aware that its many features designed to keep young people on the app “generated a constant and irresistible need to keep opening the app.” The horror. In this report from Carlos del Castillo, we tell you how TikTok knew that 15-year-old girls were undressing live in front of adults for money.
We love competition
In this section we offer you a series of articles from other media that we found interesting:
We end here. This newsletter will return with more economic information next Thursday. Until then, if you have ideas or proposals, you can write to us at contraoferta@eldiario.es.
Have a nice week!
