Escrivá’s problem lies not in his merits, but in his situation.

The most important thing in an appointment like this is that the proposed candidate is prepared. In this sense, José Luis Escriva has experience and knows the economy.

Here I am not talking about hearsay, because I listened to him for many hours (any citizen can do so) during his numerous and detailed interventions in the Congress of Deputies.

The problems with this possible appointment do not come from Escrivá, but from his situation. The most important, but not the only one, is that he is currently a government minister.

In principle, the autonomy of central banks is intended precisely to prevent them from being colonised by States. What we need to avoid is public policies being financed by the uncontrolled issue of money..

What happens is that the Bank of Spain is no longer the issuing institution of the currency, which today corresponds to the European Central Bank (ECB). Here, the governor of the Bank of Spain only has one vote, and he does not always vote.

At first glance, at least, there does not seem to be any major risk in monetary policy. But it is not only about not issuing without control, but also about preventing, for example, the risk premium, the differential we pay to finance ourselves, from skyrocketing.

Here there is another element, which is that José Luis Escriva is the main person responsible for the pension reform as Minister of Social Security. A fundamental concern of the ECB is the public deficits of the States. And the Spanish deficit, which is one of the highest in the Eurozone, is fundamentally due to the pension system. The assessment made by the European Commission in its Aging report He said Spain’s pension reform would trigger such spending in the future.

It is true that the most negative experience we have had in the area of ​​financial system supervision occurred when active politicians were appointed governors. And this is not only negative for general interests, but also for the president who appointed this governor.

When the former president of the government José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in 2008 that we had “the most solid financial system in the world”, we all thought that the governor of the Bank of Spain at the time, Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez (MAFO), I should have informed you better, to be gentle.

The problem is not the sentence, but the fact that the late intervention in the old savings banks has cost us a lot of money and has worsened the financial crisis. Although the supervision of the big banks, which make up almost the entire financial system, now depends on the ECB, the Bank of Spain and its governor still have a lot to say.

The first hot potato that Escrivá will encounter if he is appointed governor will be BBVA’s takeover bid for Banco Sabadell and its possible merger. There are two problems here. First, the government of which Escrivá is a part has expressed a frontal negative criterion, which I share, by the way, as I wrote in EL ESPAÑOL.

And secondly, he was himself a director of BBVA.

However, the most problematic area will be related to the reports of the former Research Service (currently the General Directorate of Economy and Statistics). The most emblematic example is the appearance of the governor of the Bank of Spain who opens the process of the general budgets of the State.

Here again, the problem lies in the circumstances. I think that José Luis Escriva has many interesting things to say about budgets. In fact, it was I, as former chairman of the Budget Committee, who voted in favour of the creation the appearance of the president of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIREF), then Escriva, before the Budget Committee.

I regret some of the votes and decisions I made during my political tenure, but not this one.

The problem is that José Luis Escriva participated in the preparation of the Budgets, and that the deputies and the public will be deprived of one of the only two external opinions required during the process (the other, since 2016, is that of the AIREF).

This is even more evident when the Bank of Spain pronounces on issues such as wages, social security costs, ageing or pensions, since this means evaluating the decisions of the government of which Escriva was a part, or even that he himself took.

However, with its (contextual) lights and shadows, Escrivá’s appointment is legal and legitimate. If we wanted there to be rules for this appointment, or for others in organizations such as AIREF or the National Commission for Markets and Competition, that is, in independent administrative authorities, we should have specified them in a law. There was a proposal by Ciudadanos in 2018 that did not come to fruition, and I believe that this remains a pending issue for institutional improvement and regeneration in Spain.

In any case, whether the future governor is Escrivá or not, good luck and success, because they will be everyone’s.