Household savings exceed 11%. “It is expected that this level will be maintained in the coming years,” says Centeno.

Mario Centeno, Governor of the Bank of Portugal, reveals his satisfaction with the fact that Portuguese households are increasingly investing their income in savings, compared to what happened before the pandemic.

This was one of the data analyzed by the Governor of the Bank of Portugal (BdP), during his speech at the Association for the Reconstruction of Hotels and Similar Services in Portugal (AHRESP) conference held in the city of Aveiro between the 11th and 12th. October.

“The best news is that Portuguese people and families are allocating a larger portion of their income to savings today than they did before the pandemic. The savings rate currently exceeds 11% and we expect it to maintain this level in the coming years,” he said.

For Mario Centeno, this is good news, because he believes that in moments of growth, when incomes increase, what in the economy is called a financial cushion must be created, something that has not always happened in Portugal.

He added: “We have not always done this in the past, which is why the difficulty we had in responding to the crises of 2008 and 2009 and in the second wave of that crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, which actually found the country heading towards the abyss.” He explained that the increasing debts, high debt levels, and failure to do what the economic agent should do when facing a crisis, which is to increase his savings levels.

In an intervention whose slogan was the challenges and future perspectives of the Portuguese economy, Mario Centeno assumed that he was in a privileged position. “We must be optimistic, but we must understand exactly every moment we are living. What we have at the moment is an economy that is growing and has, over the past few years, seen almost a decade of convergence with the eurozone.

Moreover, the Governor of the Portuguese Development Bank highlighted that for the first time in recent decades, the modern Portuguese economy emerged from a crisis with a lower debt level than it entered this crisis with, which occurred during the pandemic.

“This was the first time this had happened, and it was the exact opposite behavior to that which led us to the problems we had when setting tariffs arising from the sovereign debt crisis,” he said, adding that Portugal had reached 2023 “in a completely enviable way.” The situation in the European context regarding public accounts.

“There are very few countries in Europe that can face this new cycle without having to impose adjustments to public accounts. This must be our focus on maintaining financial support for families through savings, in companies that must invest in a balanced and safe way,” he stressed. In the country.

Moreover, the former Finance Minister emphasized that in recent years the national economy has been lucky enough to grow more than the European economy. Our investment has been more dynamic than in Europe. We reached 2012 with debt at 350% of GDP. In ten years this number has dropped, very easy to imagine, 111%. “We have been able to reduce the huge amount of debt as a percentage of GDP.”