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Facebook’s announcement of its own digital currency has a place on the agendas of ministries and financial regulators around the world. The U.S. government is concerned that Libya could be misused for money laundering, human trafficking, and terrorist financing; the same goes for criticism of other cryptocurrencies. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin even said it…

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Cryptocurrencies have been around for a while, but it’s Facebook’s Libra coin that has marginalized some Western governments. Henrik Böhme said they were right to be concerned. Taxi drivers around the world are rebelling against Uber’s competition. Courts have so far ruled in favor of traditional business models, but how long will this last? Hotel…

This tweet from Pedro Sánchez goes straight to the “hot topic”: three words

Follow Eurostat dataA tweet from the administration’s President Pedro Sánchez earlier this Wednesday went viral almost immediately and drew as much criticism as jokes.

“We comply. Data from Eurostat confirms that the electricity bills for Spanish households in 2021 will be similar to 2018, after adjusting for inflation,”the administrator wrote on the social network. The last three words are trending topics on Twitter.

In his message, Sanchez echoed data published by Eurostat, the European statistical office, which showed that the average electricity price paid by standard households in Spain in 2021 was 5.7% higher than in 2018, although after deducting accumulated inflation, the amount paid was 1% lower.​

The tweet sparked many reactions, such as:

Eurostat data on prices paid by the average domestic consumer with an annual consumption between 2,500 and 5,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) shows that they paid €0.2323 per kilowatt-hour (€/ MWh) in the first half of 2021, the third is 0.2816 EUR/MWh for two years, i.e., the annual average value is 0.257 EUR/MWh.

The data for 2018 shows that the price was 0.2383 EUR/MWh for the first term and 0.2477 EUR/MWh for the second term, with an average yield of 0.243 EUR/MWh.

Therefore, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE), although inflation between December 2018 and December 2021 of 6.8% has to be taken into account, the increase between the two years was 5.7%, which means that in real terms, the average price in 2021 is lower than in 2018.

Eurostat publishes its data following a homogenous method approved by community regulations and uses as a source the price information sent by marketers that is actually delivered to customers.

At the end of 2021, government President Pedro Sánchez promised that, thanks to measures such as a 21% reduction in the 10% value-added tax, electricity bills that year will be on average similar to what Spaniards paid in 2018, adjusted for inflation.

In his days, Sanchez spoke of an “unprecedented” reduction of more than 60% in domestic electricity taxes, explaining that the government has reduced the cost of relying on it by 96%.

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