When abroad, it's not unusual for a Spaniard to be mistaken for a Greek. At a distance, the accent in both languages sound so strikingly similar that, sometimes, Greek is not "all Greek to us" but we actually take it for Spanish. And yet, when it comes to the economy, Spaniards would react almost angrily at any comparison between our finances and those of our Greek friends.
It's nothing personal, and in fact Spain is strongly supportive of aiding Athens. But Spain is definitively not Greece. Not even as Standard & Poor's chose to announce its slight downgrading of the Spanish debt the very day after doing a severe downgrading of Greece's. The result: a loss of almost 3% in the Madrid stock exchange, which was momentarily hit, yes, by that most Greek-sounding word, "panic".
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