New York – Spain's minister of Industry, Tourism and Trade said here Wednesday that his country's banks are solvent, while complaining of the "very unfair" tendency to lump the Iberian nation in with euro-zone weaklings such as Ireland and Portugal.
"The original sin of Europe was to consider Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain as a club," Miguel Sebastian said at Bloomberg's Spain Investment Strategies conference in New York, alluding to the "PIIGS" acronym coined during last year's Greek debt crisis.
Greece and Ireland have already been forced to accept punitive rescue packages from the European Union and Portugal - whose prime minister resigned Wednesday after lawmakers rejected yet another round of austerity - may soon have to follow suit.
The Spanish government, however, insists it will not need to turn to the EU for help.
One analyst at Wednesday's gathering, Morgan Stanley senior European economist Daniele Antonucci, said opinions of Spain have become "too pessimistic."
Spain "is more competitive than you think," Antonucci said, referring to moves by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government to reduce the deficit and overhaul pensions and labor law.
Though Morgan Stanley forecasts continued weakness in the Spanish economy, the Iberian nation is not in the same category as Portugal, Ireland and Greece, the economist said.
Spain's public debt as a proportion of gross domestic product was 60 percent last year, Sebastian noted, "well below the European average" of 84.1 percent of GDP.
The minister also cited an "historic" increase in Spanish exports, which rose 32 percent in January compared with the same month in 2010.
The United States is the third-largest foreign investor in Spain, which hosts more than 2,500 subsidiaries of U.S. companies, Sebastian said.
Executives from many of those firms, including Alcoa, Eastman Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, attended Wednesday's conference.
Kodak Chairman and CEO Antonio Perez, himself a Spaniard, said many people have an "erroneous perception" of Spain's economic prospects.
Another Spanish native, Hewlett-Packard Senior Vice President Enrique Lores, stressed his homeland's ample supply of well-qualified workers and said that H-P planned to transfer some operations from Germany and France to Spain.