So, I'm from Spain and I currently live in Spain and I can consider myself to be a lucky one since I still have a decent job (although the possibility I will have to leave to another country still exists)...
I remember perfectly the non-sense about construction madness in Spain, I'm one of the few that never consider getting my own house, the mortage rates were impossible. But also I was consider one of the alarmist ones, one of those who did not want to believe how "well" Spain was doing economically...
Spain has a culture of easy money, do something to get a lot of money quick, without thinking into the future. Lot of people from outside Spain were buying houses to spend the summer time under the sunny Spain (typically the East and South regions of Spain...). Councils were getting a lot of money selling public soil to construction companies, and they started to think all the years will get the same amount of money and they waste it in stupid things that make the cities/town look nice but it just created public debt. Construction companies were selling houses like potatoes, they were paying politicians and technicias to look other way, and they were getting a lot of easy money from the banks... the banks were giving mortages to people who could not pay them in their entire live... and people, seeing how easily they get money from the banks were like crazy buying houses and cars more expensive they could afford... there was also this stupid theory that prices of houses never went down, buying one or more houses were believe like a really good oportunity... now a lot of people have to sell their houses but they still have a debt with the banks (in Spain the law says you have to pay the bank the price of the house + rates... if you give the house to the bank, in case you can not pay the mortage, you still have the debt of the rates, and usually more, because now the price of selling your house is lower than the price you have to pay for it)..
And of course, we have a good collection (nearly all of them) of corrupt politicians (if you look now at the news you will see that people related to the actual party in power in Spain have accounts of more than 40 million euros in foreign banks.... and looks like the prime minister is implicated, but here, nobody resigns... also, another spanish tradition).
But the situation it is worse than that... the spiral down looks it is not stopping, young people are living the country looking for jobs outside, the problem it is the young people with quite good cv the one leaving, people that we have to pay their public education, those people are going to another country, paying taxes there, and Spain is not recovering the investment done in them (our politicians are saying this is a good thing... other countries want our young people because they are good workers... if I could just slap them in the face each time they say that... ). Innmigrants are also leaving Spain... looking for better oportinities in other countries... and Spain is left with a working class that gets lower and lower, with fewer people paying taxes and wit a bigger debt each day... I'm just waiting to see when they start saying they can not pay for basic things like an ER room... public schools... etc...
So, if you think I'm pointing a very apocaliptic scenario it is because I fear that we have not reach the bottom yet... meanwhile I'm still wondering why I did not cross yet the frontier to go north in Europe, at least to a country were the politicians, when they fail, they leave the positions and not blame other people of their own faults...