Citi hires Zapatero

Not that we want to get him off the hook for his Pavlovian reaction to an opportunity to resume his hard wired good-news-all-the-time mindset, but Mr. Zapatero's inopportunely erroneous announcement that the China Investment Corporation was to sink no less than 9 billion euros into Spain's cajas de ahorros does not represent the first time that a western politician has returned from negotiations over that way with no clue as to what had been achieved, or not. If our memory serves us at all, we recall U.S. President Gerald Ford* gleefully claiming that he had a firm agreement from one of those other nations where the meaning of 'yes' is greatly complicated by the near non-existence of its opposite - Japan, in that case to open its borders to American rice.

Other items contributing to this week's trashing of eurozone peripheral debt, including that of Spain, were:

1). A recent public berating of Banco de España governor, Miguel Angel Fernández Ordóñez, by BBVA's president Francisco González;

2). Mr. Fernández's apparent refusal to play hardball with either CAM or NovaCaixaGalicia - two of the countries true financial basket cases;

3). An unfounded rumour, apparently emitted by someone at Citigroup, (with the world's press and bloggers dutifully repeating it in their role of information providers) that Greece was to restructure its sovereign debt this weekend;

and lastly, and beyond a doubt the most important...

4). Easter Week. What better moment than one of holiday sloth, abandonment and inattention to take yet another kick at the can?

Not that anyone can convince us that PP leader (and probable President 14 months from now), Mariano Rajoy, is going to have the cojones required to take on the Valencia contigent of his own party and put CAM out of its misery, it would be convenient if the utopian simpleton currently at Spain's helm were to pass the controls on to someone who has not emanated from a tarot deck.

*Readers should feel free to straighten us out if we got the wrong guy.

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