Spain's financial crisis is a lot like peeling an onion: remove one troubled layer and you only expose another.
Repeated efforts since 2009 by successive governments to fix the country's problems have only managed to undermine confidence in the fourth-largest economy among the 17 nations that use the euro.
A recession is deepening in Spain and the growing number of its regional governments seeking financial lifelines is only adding to the problems of a government already struggling to prop up its shaky banking system.
Spain's main IBEX index has lost 3 percent over the last three days while the government's borrowing costs for its debt have soared to their highest levels since the country joined the euro in 1999.
Last Friday, Spain finally got approval from the euro zone to use a euro100 billion ($121 billion) lifeline to prop up its banks weighed down with toxic assets from an unprecedented property boom that imploded.
Spanish officials had hoped a solution for the banks would prompt investors to stop demanding unmanageably high interest rates for government debt.
Such high rates forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek full-blown public finance bailouts. But instead of easing off, investors panicked again .
On Monday the country's central bank said that the economy shrank by 0.4 percent during the second quarter, compared with the previous three months.
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