The U.S. may plunge over a fiscal cliff if a budget deal can’t be concluded first, but the European Union is hurtling toward a budgetary precipice of its own amid clashing views over the bloc’s future financing. To avert that collision, E.U. officials and leaders of the 27 member states will huddle in Brussels starting Nov. 22 in search of that elusive fiscal compromise they can all live with. Don’t bank on any of them returning home with an agreement very soon.
Not only are France, Germany and the U.K. each dug into conflicting positions on a number of budgetary items. Those disagreements also center on issues central to the E.U.’s functioning, financing and even conception. In many ways the fractures over the next European budget reflect the differences on policy, reform and austerity separating Germany and France in managing the euro crisis. Wrangling elsewhere also directly echoes debate in the U.K. over Britain’s continued membership in the E.U. All else failing, summiteers might agree on a name change to the European Disunion.
The shadow banking industry has grown to about $67 trillion, $6 trillion bigger than previously thought, leading global regulators to seek more oversight of financial transactions that fall outside traditional oversight.
The size of the shadow banking system, which includes the activities of money market funds, monoline insurers and off-balance sheet investment vehicles, “can create systemic risks”and “amplify market reactions when market liquidity is scarce,” the Financial Stability Board said in a report, which utilized more data than last year’s probe into the sector.
In March, certain corners of the Internet exploded when a one-kilo gold bar was allegedly found to have been "salted" with Tungsten, a metal with a similar weight but far less valuable.
In other words, a gold bar was filled with a much cheaper metal to defraud buyers. An ounce of gold is worth $1,766, while an ounce of Tungsten is worth about $360.
An alarmed, if skeptical, post from Felix Salmon first drew attention to it.
Stock and bond certificates held in an underground Manhattan vault owned by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. were damaged by flooding in Hurricane Sandy, according to the DTCC.
The New York-based company that processes transactions in U.S. equities and government, municipal and corporate bonds said it’s too early to determine how many of the 1.3 million physical certificates can be restored, according to a statement. The 40- year-old vault was submerged when the Atlantic Ocean’s largest- ever tropical storm slammed New York City. DTCC has hired “disaster recovery and expert restoration firms” to work on the project, the firm said yesterday.
A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) commodities trader was accused by U.S. regulators of concealing an $8.3 billion position and causing the firm to lose $118 million.
Matthew Marshall Taylor in 2007 fabricated trades and obstructed the firm’s discovery of his position, risk and profits and losses, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in New York.
Go Long Hungarian Forint, And Short US Dollar As Carry Currency
For those looking to capitalize on the Fed's new QE Infinity policy, opportunities in the Forex market present a way to both ride the US Dollar's decline as well as profit with interest payments.
This is known as the 'carry trade' - however today's US Dollar carry trade is a bit different than the carry trade of the past.
Hungarian Forint
The Hungarian Forint (HUF) is the currency of Hungary, an EU member. It is one of the few EU members that has not adopted the Euro. x
The introduction of the forint on 1 August 1946 was a crucial step of the post-WWIIstabilization of the Hungarian economy, and the currency remained relatively stable until the 1980s. Transition tomarket economy in the early 1990s deteriorated the value of the forint, inflation peaked at 35% in 1991. Since 2001, inflation is single digit and the forint was declared fully convertible.[1] As a member of the European Union, the long term aim of the Hungarian government is to replace the forint with the euro.
USD/HUF Technicals
If we look at a D1 Daily chart of USD/HUF, we see that the trend from the peak of 248 is down. But the line is not straight down, there are peaks and valleys. We've indicated the peaks with red arrows, which could be good selling points.
The strategy
We suggest to sell USD/HUF by using a multiple order entry system as follows:
Take 1 short USD/HUF position regardless of where the market is, using 1:1 leverage. If you are an experienced Forex trader you can use more leverage, but this strategy should not have stop losses as the idea is to hold USD/HUF short for a long time (at least several months) Then, wait for any significant move up to sell again; at least 200 pips. See the red arrows above for selling points. When you have established several trades, stay short. You will be paid interest daily, depending on your broker. Click here to read more about Forex rollover. Profits should only be taken in the valleys after positions are deep in the money. Never close all of your orders, meaning you should always have some position in USD/HUF.
Important points on this strategy
The Forint is commonly traded with the Euro, not the US Dollar. USD/HUF is offered at many brokers. But in news and analysis you will likely see HUF compared to EUR not USD. This is because there is significantly more liquidity in EUR/HUF than USD/HUF. But remember, it's possible the HUF could go down against the EUR but up against the USD. So the point here is to trade USD/HUF and not EUR/HUF. Experienced traders might use EUR/USD as a partial hedge.
Secondly, while the HUF is a liquid currency, it is still considered an exotic and can move rapidly in one direction with relatively small order sizes (it takes less money to move the HUF rapidly, compared to EUR or GBP). So you can expect big moves to happen quickly.
Finally, spreads on USD/HUF are higher than most pairs, especially during certain market sessions. This is balanced by the fact that while the spread may be 10, 20, or even 30 pips, it may move 200 or 300 pips in a day. This is not a pair you would trade for a quick profit.
Do check with your broker for the swap rates, with using leverage, this strategy could pay 50% or more per year just in interest payments.
The current central bank base rate of the Forint is 6.25%. With the USD rate being near zero, this provides a decent swap rate. With leverage, this is multiplied by the following:
Swap rate short USD/HUF = 5%
10:1 leverage, swap rate short USD/HUF = 50%. 20:1, 100% and so on. Of course as you increase your leverage you increase your risk of the HUF moving against you, which if you used small leverage would not be so difficult to wait out.
Superstorm Sandy will end up causing about $20 billion in property damages and $10 billion to $30 billion more in lost business, according to IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.
UPDATE: The U.S. Labor Department on Monday
said it is “working hard to ensure the timely release” of the October jobs
report, saying it intends to released the report on schedule Friday despite
Hurricane Sandy.
Bloomberg
News
“It is our intention that Friday will be business as usual,” said
Carl Fillichio, a senior press advisor at Labor. Mr. Fillichio’s
statement provided clarity to an earlier Labor statement that said the agency
would assess how to handle data releases this week after the “weather emergency”
is over.
Friday’s employment report will be the final read on the labor market ahead
of the November elections. Initial reports that a delay was possible briefly
fueled speculation that the jobs data, good or bad, might not be revealed until
after the elections.
October 30, Chicago - National Futures Association (NFA) has ordered Forex
Club LLC (FX Club), a New York-based futures commission merchant and forex
dealer member, and Peter
Tatarnikov, a former principal of the firm, to pay a $300,000 fine as a
result of an NFA Complaint filed October 25 and a settlement offer submitted by
FX Club and Tatarnikov.
The Complaint, issued by NFA's Business Conduct Committee (BCC), alleged that
FX Club violated several NFA requirements, including failing to maintain
adequate books and records, failing to maintain an adequate anti-money
laundering program, failing to report trade data in a timely fashion and failing
to comply with NFA's Enhanced Supervisory Requirements. The Complaint also
alleged that FX Club-together with Tatarnikov-failed to supervise.
In addition to the $300,000 fine, FX Club also must correct all deficiencies
and implement all recommendations noted during a review conducted by an outside,
independent party, and file its fiscal year end annual statements prepared and
certified by an independent public accountant who is registered under the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
FX Club and Tatarnikov neither admitted nor denied the charges.
The video below was a class that I gave to the company's employees on
October 16, 2012. The goal is to explain the concept of rollover in the
forex market, which is synonymous with the term swap. The transcript is
below.
Shaun: Ok, so we're going to go over rollover and what it
is. It's really the interest that accrues for holding an open forex
position. When we place a trade, you guys know that we're trading on
leverage.
When we trade one lot of the EURUSD, we are trading
€100,000 and then we're selling whatever the equivalent is in USD at the
time. Right now the rate is 1.30. That means that we are buying
€100,000 and exchanging that for $130,000. This is when EURUSD is equal
to 1.3000.
Make sense so far? Unfortunately, everybody wants interest and they want
their pound of flesh. You're not just paying it for the money in your
account, you're actually owing interest and earning interest for the
positions that you have open. If you again use a current example,
interest rates are at historic lows. They use the overnight rate for
setting the rollover and swap rate on a position.The euro overnight
lending rate is set at 0.01%. It's basically free money.
The US
dollar has an overnight lending rate of 0.15%. These are annual rates.
It's pretty equivalent to what you're getting paid on a CD: almost
nothing. But, that goes have a cost associated with it. When you look in
MetaTrader, MT4 references it as the swap. In the industry, it's more
commonly known as rollover.
You have to pay interest for the
positions that you do have open because they have value. When we decide
to buy the EURUSD, that means that we own euros and we sold dollars. In
interest terms, that means that we are owed interest on the euros and we
owe interest on the dollars.
Chris: That would be bad because the US dollar is more?
Shaun:
Right. If you're buying the euro, and this is in magical fairy land
where you earn and pay the exact same amount of rollover for buying and
selling, and we'll get into exceptions in a minute, but in the "pure
scenario", you're only earning 0.01% annual interest on your euro
position. You're paying 0.15% interest on your dollar position. If
you're buying EUR/USD and held that position for a year, you would
expect to accrue a loss of 0.14%, which is the euro overnight interest
rate (0.01%) minus the dollar overnight interest rate (0.15%).
If you did the exact opposite and sold EUR/USD, you only owe 0.01% overnight interest, but you make 0.15% percent interest.
Chris: Are you assuming that you have the position open for an entire year?
Shaun:
Yes. Now, of course these rates change. These are overnight rates,
which means that over night they change on a daily basis. The amount
will fluctuate - slowly - but, it does fluctuate.
This is in the
hypothetical example where you bought EURSD, the overnight rates never
change and you held the position for precisely one year.
Chris: It's for one whole lot?
Shaun:
Yes. It's precisely one lot. One lot is the equivalent of 100,000 base
currency units. Our base currency here is the euro. 100,000 of the base
currency is 100,000 euros.
Let's go through and calculate the
rollover in our scenario of buying one standard lot of EURUSD. Apply the
0.01% rate to the €100,000 position. 0.0001 * €100,000 = €10. Of
course, you must put that back in dollar terms. €10 * $1.3000/€ (the
current exchange rate) equals $13. The $13 is the credit for the holding
the EURUSD position for an entire year.
The calculations are the
same for the dollar, except for the fact that it's now a debit. The
position of $130,000 * -0.015 (this is a negative number because we owe
it) equals... does anyone have a calculator on their phone? We all do;
we're programmers.
Andy: $195
Shaun: We have a $13 credit
and a $195 loss from the rollover. $182 is the amount of money that
we're going to lose after one year in our hypothetical scenario with the
EURUSD exchange rate not fluctuating, the overnight interest rates not
fluctuating and us holding our position for precisely one year.
The
next thing is that we need to go over the mechanics of rollover and how
it is charged. It's a little quirky. I'm stating the obvious, but there
are seven days per week.
Chris: What's with MB Trading only giving 50:1 leverage. What does that mean?
Shaun: It doesn't matter for the swap. If you have a position of €100,000, you owe interest on the €100,000.
Andy: You owe the interest on the leveraged amount?
Shaun:
Yes. It's on the leveraged amount. When we opened that €100,000
position, we did that with $2,000 on 50:1 leverage or $1,000 on 100:1
leverage. You're not paying or receiving interest on your margin amount.
You're paying or receiving it on the leveraged amount.
Chris: So if I were doing that with MB Trading, I'd have to do it with two lots?
Shaun: No. The interest is the same. You have a €100,000 position.
Chris: To leverage that much, don't I have to double my margin?
Shaun: Yes. Instead of using $1,000, now you use $2,000 to open the one lot trade.
Rollover
is seven days a week, but we know that trading doesn't happen on the
weekends. In forex, trading really happens from Sunday afternoon to
Friday afternoon. This is more of a technicality. The only really
important days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.They
need to charge interest for seven days even though there are only five
days that are important.
What they do is charge a single day of
interest on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. By convention and for
no good reason, Wednesday's rollover carries the interest charges for
Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.
Chris: Why don't they do it on Monday?
Shaun: I don't know. Why don't they do it on Thursday?
Terry: Or why don't they spread it out across the week evenly?
Shaun: Why don't you pay 1.5 days? That's just the way it is.
This is referred to as triple rollover Wednesday.
Andy: That's the for the past weekend, correct?
Shaun:
No. It has nothing to do with the weekends. Rollover occurs precisely
at 5 pm ET. When you look at the charts of most brokers, they are mostly
based on broker time. But in the forex industry by convention, 5 pm ET
is the start of a new day. 5 pm ET on Sunday is actually the start of
Monday. 5 pm ET on Monday is actually the start of Tuesday's trading
day. Tuesday's trading day concludes at 4:59 pm on Tuesday.
Andy: But on Wednesday, you get charged for the past Saturday and Sunday?
Shaun:
Even if you didn't have the trade open! If you decide - very poorly -
at 4:59 pm on Wednesday that you're going to open a trade, and you close
the trade two minues later at 5:01 pm on Wednesday, you are going to
earn or pay triple rollover.
Andy: Oh, so it has nothing to do with the last weekend. They just charge you three times for whatever happens on that day.
Shaun:
It's a market quirk. If you hold that position precisely at 5 pm, you
owe interest. If you do not, you do not owe interest. If you had the
trade open for 23 hours and 59 minutes, but you closed it before 5 pm,
no triple rollover. But if you have it at 5 pm, then you pay triple
rollover.
It's the same concept on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, except it's only single rollover.
Chris: What's to keep people from finding a favorable currency comparison and just opening trades for two minutes every day?
Shaun: Lots of people try that and it doesn't work because of spread
costs. Notice that the rollover rates are so tiny. We're talking about
0.01% per annum. Divide that per day and it's a silly amount. It's so
negligible that you don't really care.
There are exceptions.
There's Golden Week and this involves the yen. There are days where
triple rollover Wednesday becomes nine times Wednesday. You earn the
interest for two weeks of trading.
Andy: Do brokers do that to get people to trade with them or something? Is that a for fun thing or is there an actual reason:
Shaun: It's because Japan shuts down for two weeks.
Chris: It's only in yen pairs?
Shaun:
Yes. Anything involving a yen pair in May has Golden Week where you
have a monster rollover day. It's kind of the way it is.
People do
try to take advantage of it. When interest rates were higher a couple
of years ago, there was a big differential between the pound and the
yen. The pound had an interest rate of 5.25% and the yen, as it is
today, had an annual interest rate near zero at 0.25%. I think today
that it's 0.1. The point is that there was a massive difference between
the two of 5%. You could earn that on the leveraged position.
Chris: Does that make the price spike?
Shaun:
Yeah, it does. People want to earn this money. This is what drives
currency market, the shift in the interest rates. People chase yield. If
I can open an account in GBP and I can earn 5.25%, if I'm holding yen,
that's looking really attractive to me.
I might consider the idea
of converting my yen into pounds so that I can the extra 5%. This is
referred to as a carry trade. It's the idea of using leveraged money to
earn the difference in the interest rates. It's possible and it can be
lucrative. The problem is that it depends on your timing of exchange
rates.
If you expect that... let me think of a scenario that
applies to today. Let's say that the ECB decides to reverse course, and
this is not likely to happen at all. Right now, they're trying to keep
their interest almost at zero. Let's say they decided to stop
intervening in the market and to charge a real interest rate. The euro
interest rate would go through the roof, which motivates people to put
their money into euros instead of dollars, yen, Australian dollars,
whatever. If you expect that trend to continue for several years, that
is a great motivation for buying that currency. Not only do you earn the
increasing differential in the two currencies' interest rates, but more
people are likely to follow the trade. The higher an interest rate is,
the more likely people are to buy that currency.
That was the
reason behind Brazil's hot market as of about two years ago. Interest
rates were 13-14% and everything was appreciating through the roof. You
could sit back and know that you were going to make 14% in reals. The
problem is that if you top the market like when the market yielded 14%,
you earned 14% in reals and then the price plummeted by 30%. Timing is
critical.
That's the fundamental reason that the market exists.
That's why people trade currencies. Not just for exchanges of payments,
but for speculation, that is entirely why people participate. It looks
like free money. There are all sorts of examples.
Oddly enough,
most of the mortgages in Poland are denominated in Swiss francs. The
reason is that the Swiss had a very, very low interest rate compared to
what the Polish zloty was charging at the time. If you could pay 0.5%,
why are you going to pay 5% interest to have it denominated in zlotys?
Well,
the reason is because the Swiss franc has been appreciating for several
years. Now half of Polish homeowners are severely underwater because
the value of their loans has appreciated by 20 or 30%. They only make
their income in zlotys. That's the risk of the market. Those are the
kind of real world examples of why people decide to participate and why
rollover is really important.
This is the electronic form of how
it applies to our traders and our customers speculating in markets. The
real mechanics behind it are more tangible like in the mortgage example.
Andy:
Is it common for strategies to keep track of I would make money, so I
want to hold my trade until I hit my interest point for the day?
Shaun:
You could, but it's a silly risk. If you think that it's dangerous to
be in now, you're going to stay in risking an average of 120 pips of
movement in the EURUSD so that you can capture the equivalent of 0.25
pips.
Andy: Ok, so it's pretty much worthless.
Shaun: Yeah.
Terry:
Your current interest rate, is that something that a strategy has
access to at the market level? Are we able to go out and query that?
Shaun: No.
Terry: So, it means that it has to be fed that values from some other source, which means...
Shaun: Nope. It has nothing to do with backtesting. It doesn't make assumptions about rollover. It isn't present in MetaTrader
on a historical basis. It is available in real time and I can show you
guys where to find that. It's not something that most people look at as
part of a strategy. It is an important part, but it shouldn't be the
maker or breaker. It should be a little bit of juice. You use it to pad
the margins a little bit or it might be a drag on performance. It should
not be the primary reason why you're entering a trade now at 4:59 pm
so that you can capture the tenth of a pip in interest cost and pay 2.5
pips in the process.
The one thing that I wanted to point out,
too, is that everything that I explained is kind of hypothetical. You
either lose 0.14% or you make 0.14% on an annual basis. In reality,
that's not how most brokers work. It's a good way that they pad their
margins.
This is how they make a slight amount of money on traders
that aren't trading, through the difference in the rollover rates that
they charge. In the example that I sent you, and assuming that we opened
MetaTrader and that it was a perfectly equal market, you would see that buying costs you. MetaTrader
shows you in dollars, but I'm just going to put it in percentages. You
expect a return of -0.14% for buying EURUSD and a return of +0.14% for
selling EURUSD.
What happens most of the time is that everything
gets skewed against you. The cost becomes a bigger number and the profit
becomes a smaller number.
Chris: You're saying it's the broker that does this?
Shaun:
Yes. It can be the broker or it can be the ultimate liquidity provider
behind the broker, but yes, the interest rates are set and then they get
shifted. Obviously, someone earns that differential.
Terry: So, obviously, these are within the bounds of legal priorities based on trading rules?
Shaun: Yes. It is a cost. I don't know of anybody that discloses it. I don't know who the ultimate beneficiary is to be honest.
Terry: It's the broker.
Shaun:
That's my assumption that the broker is making the difference. If they
net their trades, they should be capturing that difference. If you have
50,000 clients and most of them are piled into the EURUSD, there's only
going to be a certain amount of net exposure. Only say 10% of that
difference is going to be net long or short. You can net out the
difference between these two and keep all of it.
It's not super lucrative, but it's money sitting there and they take it.
Terry: A dime times 50,000 is lucrative.
Shaun: Yes. It adds up.
Terry: Especially when it's all electronic.
Shaun. Yes.
Chris: Maybe I'm behind the times, but I thought they were pressuring the euro zone to ease.
Shaun: They are.
Chris: But they're already way below the dollar.
Shaun.
Well, the target headline rate in the euro zone is 1.25%, which is the
result of the central bank intervening. They're buying Spanish bonds,
Italian bonds. Basically, the bonds that literally nobody wants. They're
buying them so that the interest rates go down.
If I'm going to
loan money, you have to make the call for your business or multinational
corporation. You have to decide. Do you want to tie up money in junk
debt for a year and get 6% in Spanish bonds? Or do you want to loan to
the ECB directly at 0.01%. You get paid almost nothing, but at least you
know you'll get your euros back.
Terry: Well, it depends on how
long you're planning on being in it and what you think the future is
going to turn. If you think that's going to turn, then go ahead and camp
on it now and get it for nothing.
Shaun: Right.
Terry: If you can afford to be in it that long.
Shaun: Yes, and that's why there are interest rate curves. That's a whole different subject.
If
you lend for a day, and let's use the US Treasury as the simplest
example, we start out with bills at the short end of the duration. Bills
are anything about a 90 day coupon and out to a year. You can buy a
treasury note for the one year, two year, five year and ten year. Each
duration is supposed to get higher and higher, but the further out you
go, you're supposed to get a higher rate of interest. It's rather
negligible compared to the duration. The difference between the
overnight and the 3 month is pretty substantial. The difference between
the 10 year and 30 year is supposed to be more substantial, but
obviously the time involved is almost beyond comparison.
That's why in the original EURUSD example I said that the overnight rate is this, because that's what we use in forex.
What people are really looking at when they're deciding whether or not
to take out mortgages or to loan money in different sovereign bonds,
they're looking at one year yields, ten year yields.
Terry: It seems like it doesn't make sense to go past ten years. Three decades is a long time to tie something up.
Shaun:
In that market I would agree, but there were people in the 1970s that
caught the US Treasury in the height of the stagflation when interest
rates in the US were at 17%. They loaned money when the short term rates
were actually inverted. People were taking the easy money earning 17%
annually over 3-6 months. The smart money locked up those interest rates
at 14% for thirty years. They made 14% per annum.
Terry: Compounded.
Shaun:
... compounded for 30 years. They guys that made the thirty years made a
killing and as close to risk free as you could get at the time.
Today, I would argue that's suicide. I don't think the dollar will be around in 30 years. But, that's a different story.
Andy:
When do these costs get calculated? Every day at 5 o'clock, they say
you gained two cents or whatever. When did that fee get charged.
Shaun:
Interest rates are a really complicated subject. They're actually the
result of a huge scandal right now that I know none of you know about,
none of the people that I know know about, but that everyone should be
up in arms about. It's called the LIBOR Scandal.
LIBOR is where
overnight interest rates are set. It's not a free market. It's voted on
by a group of 30 some-odd banks. It's all the normal culprits, the
people that are despised and rightfully so: the Goldman Sachs of the
world, Barclay's, RBS, Bank of America. Any bank that you've heard of
that's international, they're probably one of the banks that set the
LIBOR rates.
They all get to vote and decide what is tonight's
interest rate for the US dollar. When they set the rate, that's what
every bank in the world uses to set its overnight lending rate.
Chris: They just pull it out of thin air or they base it on something?
Shaun:
They pull it out of thin air. They just vote. There's a formulawhere
they throw out the most extreme votes and keep the average of the middle
ones.
It's the most important market in the world because it
affects everything that connects to money. It affects stocks, real
companies, bonds, mortgages, currencies... it affects everything.
What
happened this summer was that the Bank of England got caught
encouraging Barclay's to manipulate the LIBOR rate. As you can image,
banks have a strong interest in voting whether the LIBOR goes up or
down. It affects all sorts of things like how much they have to pay
savers in their CDs. How much do they charge for a mortgage. They have
all sorts of motivations to keep the interest rates as absolutely low as
possible to benefit themselves. That's what happened.
LIBOR is set in London, but it really doesn't matter. All the banks are international. It's really just a committee.
Andy: With no government oversight?
Shaun:
It was with the active collusion of the Bank of England and the Federal
Reserve. They encouraged the banks to keep the interest rates low
because it aligned with their policy objectives.
The New York Stock ExchangeNYX+0.32% said its trading floor would be closed starting Monday, as New York City braced for Hurricane Sandy and a shutdown of the city's transit system.
Trading in all securities listed on the Big Board will be moved to Arca, an electronic trading platform operated by New York Stock Exchange parent NYSE Euronext, according to a statement by the company. The market operator said activity will also be suspended on its NYSE MKT exchange, formerly known as the Amex.
"We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York," said Duncan L. Niederauer, chief executive of NYSE Euronext, in a statement.
Spanish unemployment climbed to a record in the third quarter as a deepening recession left one in four workers jobless, adding pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to seek a second European bailout.
Unemployment, the second highest in the European Union after Greece, rose to 25.02 percent from 24.6 percent in the previous quarter, the National Statistics Institute said in Madrid today. That is the highest since at least 1976, the year after dictator Francisco Franco’s death ledSpain to democracy.
