Drive to attract more foreign firms

Spain's new government hopes to attract foreign banks after it whittles down the number of financial firms and forces them to clean up their balance sheets after the country's real estate collapse. “There is an opportunity,” Spain's economy minister Luis de Guindos said yesterday at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “We will have in Spain fewer players in the banking landscape but much sounder and much safer, with better corporate governance,” he said.
This month the government forced Spain's banks to deal with an additional $66 billion in losses on assets left over from the housing collapse.