After barreling into the state of Texas, as one of the largest and most damaging Hurricanes in U.S history, Hurricane Harvey continues to devastate the Corpus Christi-Houston-Galveston area with catastrophic destruction, human losses, and unprecedented flooding.

As the region begins to pick up the pieces in the weeks, months and years to come, there is a growing concern about the impact that Hurricane Harvey will have on the regional and national economy.

On March 25, 1957, representatives from the six founding countries of the European Community put their signatures to the Treaties of Rome, consisting of blank pages due to a problem with the printing. Sixty years on, Europe "is an enormous success", but today it also has "blank pages still to be filled in" for the project to continue with its process of completion. This was the metaphor used by Jose Manuel González-Páramo, the CEO of BBVA, to describe the current situation of the EU.

Professional life is littered with difficult choices. Am I ready for this promotion? Which of my managers should I pick as a mentor? What should I eat at lunch? There is no foolproof method for consistently taking the best course of action —even the best of us make mistakes—  but, with the right tools, it is possible to maximise the chances of success.

Jackson Hole is a town of only 9,000 inhabitants located in a valley in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in the US State of Wyoming. Apparently, there is nothing newsworthy about it, and, so, why have we been reading and hearing its name so often in the media lately?

Urbanization in Latin America began to increase in the second half of the 20th Century, to reach nearly 80% of the population today. In spite of the great expansion in recent decades, BBVA Research predicts that there will be a certain moderation in this growth, until it reaches 86%.

Garanti Bank believes that for any economy to achieve further growth, the participation of women in the labor force is crucial. Women must be encouraged to be entrepreneurs, and women- owned businesses must be supported. Garanti took action in 2006, becoming the first private bank to define  women entrepreneurs as a separate client segment. "To empower women entrepreneurs", Garanti Bank has had a sustainable Women Entrepreneurs program over a decade. In this respect, the activities focus on four core areas; access to finance, encouragement, education and penetrating new markets.

During the presidential election, then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump proposed various plans aiming to boost the U.S. economy to a state of higher economic growth, high labor participation rate, low unemployment, and reduced trade deficits. Specifically, those plans asked for increasing infrastructure spending and implementing protectionist trade policies.

Every year, BBVA Open Challenges proposes a number of challenges aimed at finding solutions to the challenges identified in different areas of the bank. The registration phase for two new editions of this contest will open in August: Challenge F4C, covering proposals to transform the relationship between banks and customers; and Challenge Global Trends, which seeks to transform the trading of tomorrow through augmented reality and intelligent algorithms.

BBVA has recently joined the Singapore-based Capital and Credit Risk Manager (CCRM) platform as a full member bank. CCRM is a Digital Market Place providing a secondary market for trade and working capital risks, owned by Tin Hill Capital and supported with a grant from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Financial Sector Development Fund.

Mexico´s medium —and long— term perspectives are favorable, given the possibility of an improved NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and recent, profound structural reforms that are beginning to bear fruit.