Madrid’s bankers and bureaucrats winced in unison when José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, boasted in New York last month that Spain had “perhaps the most solid financial system in the international community”.

Mr Zapatero’s comments to a business audience seemed like a hostage to fortune, given that even as he spoke the gravest financial crisis since the 1920s was spreading rapidly from the US and UK to continental Europe.