2023-07-20 00:40:21
Electoral campaigns are propitious situations for demagogy: the politician who knows how to deceive the masses with greater skill will reap more support and therefore greater power. And one way to manipulate the masses is by creating fictitious enemies to blame for all the ills that a person may suffer at any given time. Let’s take the case of interest rate rises: if the interest rates paid by those with variable-rate mortgages have risen in recent years, it is because the European Central Bank has decided so and if the European Central Bank has decided so, it is because it needs to fight inflation that has skyrocketed as a result of the enormous fiscal and monetary stimuli that the States have promoted in previous years. But politicians do not seek to channel public anger against themselves (for obvious reasons) and not even against the European Central Bank, but against private banks that limit themselves to transferring the ECB interest rate rise to interest rates Variables of mortgage holders who refused to take out a fixed-rate mortgage.
And lo and behold, now our political messianics arrive and intend to get very tough against the banks: Gabriel Rufián, from ERC, proposes to “cap” variable interest rates and Sumar demands that the conversion of variable mortgages into fixed mortgages be done without penalty for the banks. The first is certainly nonsense: if there were variable interest rates with very low maximum rates, then de facto we would be turning variable mortgages into capped fixed mortgages; that is, banks would stop offering variable-rate mortgages (caps) and would only offer fixed-rate mortgages at whatever the market interest rate was: and if this was too onerous, then the client would not be able to access a mortgage. The second thing is disconcerting: right now, the code of good practices signed by the banks already makes this transition possible at no cost. Probably, therefore, what Sumar seeks is to reconvert the variable mortgages into fixed mortgages at the interest rate they decide (which is not the fixed market interest rate). In that case we would be facing another nonsense that would also extinguish variable rate mortgages in the future. Why don’t politicians stop lying and keep making the situation worse? Perhaps because then they would stop being politicians.
#Mortgages #enter #campaign