Metal safes popular in crisis-hit Spain

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

People enter an unemployment registry office in Madrid, Spain. AP photo

The crisis in Spain has triggered sale of metal safes in Spain, as citizens return to mattress savings rather than keeping their cash in banks.

Metal safe sales increased 20 percent in the first quarter of 2012 from the same period a year earlier, the Anatolia news agency has reported.

According to data by the Spanish central bank, some 31 billion euros of cash was withdrawn from lenders in March and April.

A simple safe costs between 300 and 500 euros. The increasing burglary rate is another reason for the rise in safe sales.

Spanish industrial output plummeted in April, official data showed yesterday, in a fresh sign that recession is tightening its hold on the crisis-hit economy. Factories, mines and utilities slashed output in April by 8.3 percent year-on-year after smoothing out seasonal blips, the National Statistics Insitute said.

It was the eighth straight

month of yearly decline, grim news for an economy already battered by 24.4 percent unemployment, a banking crisis and mounting expectations of an international bailout.

Spain will decide how to fill an 80-billion-euro hole in the country’s bank finances within two weeks, Finance Minister Luis De Guindos said yesterday,

In Brussels for talks, De Guindos said Madrid would “take decisions on recapitalization within approximately 15 days,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Worries were mounting over Spain’s finances, with Madrid needing help to find 80 billion euros ($100 billion) for bank recapitalizations in the midst of a deep recession brought on by the bursting of a property bubble.