While the use of cash is reduced, there are more tickets than ever

The term in economics “Net negative emission”It occurs when a central bank includes more tickets than it puts into circulation through the banking system. That is, if commercial banks return to the Central Bank more money in cash than request, the net balance between distributed and retired bills is negative. It happens that it is something exceptional in developed economies, and in Spain the phenomenon does not stop multiplying.

Sustained anomaly. I told it in A report the newspaper.es. Apparently, since 2007, and with the Exception of the pandemic year 2020, Spain has continued a negative net issue of bills. As we said, the phenomenon, practically unpublished in the whole of the eurosystem, implies that the Bank of Spain collects more effective than it distributes, something that no other central bank of the euro zone experiences with the same magnitude or persistence.

Not just that. The situation has reached extraordinary levels in 2023 and 2024, when the differences amounted to 13.4 billion and 12.2 billion of euros respectively. In total, the accumulated balance of retired bills without counterpart in new broadcasts has reached 26.5 billion at the end of 2024.

Although the Bank of Spain attributes This imbalance to the tourist boom (especially to German origin), the available data They invite you to think about more complex causes, since no other country with high levels of tourism shows a similar dynamic. Neither Greece, nor France, nor Italy records a massive return of physical tickets with those characteristics.

The suspicious weight. He counted the medium That one the most striking aspects of the phenomenon is the nature of the re -turned tickets. More than half (53.5%) of the physical tickets recovered in Spain during 2024 corresponded to Values ​​of 100, 200 or 500 euros. This proportion contrasts and much with what happens in other surrounding countries: in France, high denomination tickets represent 25.4% of the total returned, and in Italy just 9.7%.

Plus: differences cannot be attributed exclusively to tourist profile, since 64% of returns occur outside the central quarter of tourism (July, August and September), which further weakens the seasonal hypothesis. Thus, the constant presence of large value tickets suggests, therefore, a sustained refloration of black money, particularly the one from past times, such as … the real estate bubble prior to the 2008 crisis.

Brick echoes. The explanation is given because in the years of the real estate sector, especially between 2002 and 2007, Spain came to concentrate the 30% of all 500 euros tickets issued by the ECB, a disproportionate proportion with respect to the size of its economy. In July 2007, the accumulated total of these tickets in circulation within the country reached The 56,956 million eurosfigure that coincides with the apogee of the real estate speculation cycle.

Although the issuance of 500 bills ceased in 2019, they are still a legal tender and, according to Data from the Bank of Spain itself3,157 million were still in circulation in March 2025. Only in 2024 they withdrew from the system More than 1,150 million In this denomination, a notable figure that points to an still active outcrop process. The progressive withdrawal of these tickets cannot be explained solely by ordinary tourist or financial transactions, rather, it would fit with a gradual regularization of cumulative effective cash for decades.

The track: the real estate market. The connection between the massive return of cash and the behavior of the current real estate market adds, if possible, another layer of complexity to the analysis. In his 2024 annual reportthe Bank of Spain itself warns that one of the factors that is making access to housing more expensive is the growth of demand by non -residentswhich already represent 8.4% of all purchases.

Specific areas. The pressure is especially intense in tourist regions such as the islands or the Mediterranean coast, where foreign investment is oriented to holiday use and rental profitability. As The newspaper explainedalthough the report does not directly link these flows with the phenomenon of the negative net emission, it does suggest an economic frame in which the large amounts of cash, again, probably opaque, they find exit In real estate investment.

Thus, the hypothesis of which part of the returned tickets comes from irregular or not declared operations, linked to the sale of properties or tourist rental, becomes strength in the absence of an official alternative explanation sufficiently consistent.

Image | Bank of Spain

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