Algunos rasgos básicos del sector bancario

The origin of the banking crisis is well-known: national and internacional competition and, thus, a necessary adaptation to the fact that the market can no longer be oligopolistic and subjected to limited price and product competition. The size of the banking crisis is more difficult to ascertain, and it is equally difficult to compare to that in other sectors, but if crises are to be compared exclusively by the amount of funds invested in their correction, surely the banking crisis has a bigger direct economical effect than the crisis in the iron and steel industry. The purpose of this article is to provide a very market-oriented overview of the Basque banking sector, so as to be able to deduce some ideas in order to interpret such crisis and the different behavlour of some entities wlth respect to others. It is the intention of the author not so much to convey his own interpretation as it is to share some statistics which will allow the reader to draw his own conclusions.