Spain's unemployment rate hit 26% again this week. Despite Rajoy's please for people to believe things are getting better, that the crisis is over (even as Draghi proclaims it otherwise and Axel Weber warns it is still festering), Spanish local ex-pat newspaper "The Local" [5] has uncovered seven statistics that will help you understand just how serious the situation is. What is perhaps even more surreal is that in a year in which the economy supposedly grew, they depleted their pension reserve fund by 15%...
- *SPAIN WITHDREW EU11.6B FROM PENSION RESERVE FUND IN 2013
- Spain pension reserve fund ends 2013 With EU53.7 bln
So apart from that, here is how bad it really is in Spain...
Via The Local, [5]
New unemployment figures from Spain's National Statistic Institute (INE) show that recent macroeconomic improvements in Spain are yet to create new jobs.
While Spain has now clocked up two consecutive quarters of fragile growth, the INE data — based on a quarterly survey of 65,000 homes nationwide known as the EPA — shows the country's unemployment climbed back up to 26.03 percent at the end of 2013, up from 25.98 percent three months earlier.
Here The Local provides seven statistics that highlight the extent of Spain's unemployment problem.
1) Spain has now seen six straight years of job destruction. Some 198,900 jobs disappeared in Spain last year, and 3.5 million have vanished since the country's crisis began in 2008.
2) There are 1,832,300 households in Spain where nobody has a job. That is 1.36 percent more than a year earlier.
3) Some 686,600 households in Spain have now income at all — not even social security. That is twice the figure seen in 2007, or before the crisis struck.
4) More than 3.5 million in Spain have been out of work for at least a year — that 61 percent of all people who currently find themselves without work in the country.
Some 2.3 million people have been out of work for at least two years.
5) Spain's new jobs are of poor quality. The number of ongoing positions in Spain fell by 269,000 in 2013 while the number of temporary contracts rose by 81,300.
6) Some 69,000 found work in 2013, but unemployment actually rose in the final three months of the year.
This is because the number of 'active' people in Spain — those working, or seeking employment — actually fell by 267,900 last year, leaving a smaller pool of people fighting for the same jobs.
Many people — especially those in the 16–35 age group — have simply given up looking for work, or have left the country to look for work elsewhere. They are therefore no longer included in the official figures.
7) Working Spaniards put in 5.86 million hours of overtime every week from October to December, up 18.4 percent on a year earlier.
A total of 57.7 percent of those hours, or 3.38 million a week are unpaid. This is equivalent to 146,500 new jobs, says Spain's La Voz de Galicia newspaper.
Of course, the emerging market contagion spreads quickly from Latin America to Spain and is alreeady impacting their banks...