ANTONIO Banderas may just be an actor with only acting as his educational forte and is never educated with engineering or medicine, let alone law. But he is a very smart person even in the field of economics. I’ll tell you why. Spain has a limited film industry and pales compared to the Hollywood, Bollywood and Philippine film industries. Hollywood eats up $3 billion in net profits annually, Bollywood of Mumbai, India has even a larger share than that at $4 billion in earnings. Spain’s is definitely limited. But this limitation has not prevented Antonio Banderas to shine. After making a few bucks as an actor in Spain, he tried out in the United States where he perseveringly auditioned for Hollywood roles. Eventually, he wound up in The Mambo Kings.

His role in The Mambo Kings paved the way for producers of Assassins to hire him as the nemesis of Slyvester Stallone. That was his only Hollywood role where he made the most extraordinary effort to act. That role impressed Robert Rodriguez who hired him in Desperado and the rest of course is history. More salivating and enviable roles would come such as him being cast opposite Madonna herself in Evita, as Zorro and as a doting father to child heroes in another Robert Rodriguez flick, a children’s movie called Spy Kids. During that decade where he played those roles, he raked in millions of dollars. This is where Antonio Banderas’s smartness comes in. Where did he invest his money? He certainly did not spend it in Hollywood unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger who invested it in Planet Hollywood or Johnny Depp who invested their income to The Viper Room which is a place for rich drug addicts.

Instead, Antonio invested all his income in Spain. Mr. Banderas must have foreseen the economic crisis in the United States as early as five years ago. The economic crisis in the United States is really serious. It first started as a housing mortgage crisis and now, stock owners are worried about their money so they dumped their stocks massively causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to open 300 points lower the other day. The Federal Reserve made the biggest interest rate cut in history at its expense because of that. Yet, Antonio Banderas is smiling.

He is because the Bank of Spain, which is the counterpart of the Federal Reserve, knows that situation will never reach Spain. Prime Minister Zapatero, currently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, certainly knows this. At the prime of his career, Antonio Banderas purchased prime properties in various areas of Spain from Madrid to Barcelona to Garabandal to Valencia to Costa Blanca to Costa del Sol and even to offshore places Palma de Mallorca, Ibiza, Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. What did he do to these prime properties? He erected restaurants to all of them serving nothing but Mediterranean diet. And the income is good. That is why despite the economic crisis in his location in the United States, Antonio Banderas is smiling.