Infinite Unknown

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- Spain: Unemployment Tops Record, Rising At Fastest Rate In A Year:

… an incredulous 57.2% of under-25s out of work, Spain is closing in on Greece, according to official data, for the worst youth unemployment situation in Europe.

- Spain Is Beyond Doomed: The 2 Scariest Unemployment Charts Ever (The Atlantic, April 26, 2013):

Spain is in a great depression, and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen.

Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It’s almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years. You can see this 1930s-style catastrophe in the chart below from the National Statistics Institute. Continue reading »

Tags: Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Politics, Society, Spain, Unemployment

- Spanish Unemployment Tops Record, Rising At Fastest Rate In A Year (ZeroHedge, April 25, 2013):

In yet another worse-than-expected macro data point, Spain has just breached the 27% unemployment level – the highest since at least 1976, when data began following dictator Francisco Franco’s death. At 27.2% this is already higher than the IMF’s year-end estimate of 27% suggesting growth estimates are already overly optimistic. What is more concerning is the rate of increase in the joblessness is rising once again. The 1.1 percentage point rise is the largest in a year and 177,700 more households now have no actively employed members than a year ago. The greatest fear though, for European leaders and the Spanish people themselves, is the surge in youth unemployment. As we have noted a number of times in the past, the possibility of social unrest is exaggerated significantly by this number and at an incredulous 57.2% of under-25s out of work, Spain is closing in on Greece, according to official data, for the worst youth unemployment situation in Europe.

…

Tags: Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Spain, Unemployment

- Lawmaker Unemployment Hearing Attended By Single Member of Congress At Opening (Huffington Post, April 25, 2013):

WASHINGTON — More than five years since the start of the Great Recession, unemployment remains a major economic problem in the United States, with long-term unemployment among its most stubborn aspects.

Nobody told Congress.

A hearing Thursday on long-term unemployment held before the 19-member Joint Economic Committee began with just a single lawmaker in attendance. Panelists testifying on the problem and its potential solutions spoke only to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the committee’s vice-chair, for the beginning of the roughly 90-minute session.

Continue reading »

Tags: Congress, Global News, Government, Politics, U.S., Unemployment

- Hundreds of thousands of Master’s degree holders, PhDs on food stamps (Natural News, Feb 2, 2013):

Shelling out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for higher education may no longer be the surefire path to a great career that it used to be. A recent report compiled by the education resource group OnlineColleges.net found that more than 300,000 Americans with either Master’s degrees or Ph.D.s were receiving food stamps in 2010 — and many more are likely on some form of government assistance today as economic conditions since that time have only continued to worsen.

To give a point of reference as to how bad the situation truly is, there were fewer than 100,000 Americans with Master’s degrees or Ph.D.s on food stamps in 2007, which means the overall number of people with extensive college educations on government assistance more than tripled in just three years. And if this trend continued at the same rate between 2010 and 2013, the total number of college educated on government assistance today has easily eclipsed more than half a million, and with no end in sight.

Continue reading »

Tags: Collapse, Economy, Food stamps, Global News, U.S., Unemployment

- The New “Nazis” of Spain (Testosterone Pit, April 16, 2013):

On Saturday, Popular Party Secretary-General María Dolores de Cospedal, number two of the governing party in Spain, said that she knew she was going to get criticized, “but this is pure Nazism.” On Sunday, rather than resigning, she repeated it. For more precision, she added that going to someone’s house to “harass” him “is a totalitarian attitude comparable to what occurred in the thirties in a European country.” A reference to Nazis marking the homes of Jews.

But these “Nazis” are folks who are standing up to the banks and draconian mortgage laws that the government is hell-bent on protecting. And they have a special word for their action: escrache. It had become popular in Argentina in 1995 after President Carlos Menem pardoned collaborators of the Junta. Activists with banners would gather in front of the home or office of a pardoned perpetrator. They’d chant and play music to let neighbors know. While Junta members were beyond the law, they could still be publicly humiliated.

Continue reading »

Tags: Corruption, EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Politics, Society, Spain, Unemployment

- Greek Unemployment Soars By 1.5% In One Month, Hits Record 27.2% (ZeroHedge, April 11, 2013):

There was much hope in the feudal states of Europe that the monthly December drop in Greek unemployment – the first in years – was the beginning of the end for local misery. Alas, it appears the Greek statistics office leaarned a thing or two from the BLS and it was all seasonal adjustments. As reported earlier today, things just got much worse again, with January unemployment surging by 1.5% in one month to a new all time record high 27.2%. More importantly, the number of employed people in Greece, which dropped to a new record low of 3.617,771 compared to 3,888,400 a year ago (and down 11,653 from December), is now nearly as much as the entire inactive population at 3,346,423 and far below the ranks of the unemployed (1,348,694 – an all time high as well) and inactive. Continue reading »

Tags: Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Greece, Unemployment

- Spanish Home Prices Plunge Most On Record (ZeroHedge, April 11, 2013):

Despite reassurances from D-Boom that “Spain can once again be the engine of growth for Europe,” the troubled nation appears to be going from bad to worse. House prices dropped 9.7% YoY in Q4 2012, its biggest drop on record, taking the price back to 2004 levels. This price pressure merely exacerbates the Spanish banking system’s delinquent loans and drives up unemployment. But Spain is not alone, Slovenia, which many have their eye on for being the next bail-in, saw house prices slide 8.8% according to IBTimes. Perhaps there is a correlation between house price bubbles (cough US cough) and banking/sovereign collapse.Growth Engine?

House prices fell at the fast pace on record in Q4 2012…

and Spanish non-performing loans are increasing at an ever-faster rate to September

as unemployment surges to all-time record highs…

Chart: Bloomberg

Tags: Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Real Estate, Unemployment, wspain

Which is still only the U-6 unemployment rate!

An even more realistic unemployment rate is:

The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.

The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.

And that brings us to a real unemployment rate of about 23%:

Source: Alternate Unemployment Charts (Shadow Government Statistics)

- Unemployment Is Really 14.3%–Not 7.6% (Forbes, April 8, 2013):

The current job-creation numbers are meaningfully below the level we might expect during a period of record corporate earnings and the reaching of new peaks in the major stock market indices.

Let’s go to the videotape –

The unemployment rate is 7.7%. But, there is another 0.6% of discouraged workers,(about 800,000) mainly the young, minorities and those without the all-necessary high school diploma. Another 0.9% are only marginally employed (whatever that means) and have mostly stopped looking for a job recently. More crushing is the 5.1% of the workforce most impacted by the 2008 downturn, who are working only part-time and would prefer to have a full-time position. That 5.1% part-time workers total 8 million people, who mostly are having trouble making ends meet and most likely have no health plan from their employer, according to Bob Eisenbreis, vice chairman and chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisers, a New York-based investment firm that makes useful comments on the economy.

These numbers added together suggest that the true unemployment level– when part-time workers are included– is 14.3%–meaning that one in seven of every potential full-time employee in the U.S. economy is not able to earn a proper living wage–and thereby contribute to the snails-pace of economic growth.To my way of thinking the dropout rate is the most perplexing, because how do these people survive? Moreover, the percentage of people employed is only 58.5%, down from 61%, the level hit in 2008 when Obama was first elected–and to be fair before the meltdown on Wall Street. And the jump in first-time unemployment claims last week was the highest level since last November.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Economy, Global News, Government, Obama administration, U.S., Unemployment

Flashback:

- Welcome to the Recovery (New York Times, by Timothy Geithner, August 2, 2010)

‘Recovery’ is the ‘Greatest Depression’ ..

… and …

‘War is peace’.

- More Than 101 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have A Job (Economic Collapse, April 7, 2013):

The jobs recovery is a complete and total myth.  The percentage of the working age population in the United States that had a job in March 2013 was exactly the same as it was all the way back in March 2010.  In addition, as you will see below, there are now more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job.  But even though the employment level in the United States has consistently remained very low over the past three years, the Obama administration keeps telling us that unemployment is actually going down.  In fact, they tell us that the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of 10.0% all the way down to 7.6%.  And they tell us that in March the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% even though only 88,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy.  But it takes at least 125,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth.  So how in the world are they coming up with these numbers?  Well, the reality is that the entire decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years can be accounted for by the reduction in size of the labor force.  In other words, the Obama administration is getting unemployment to go down by pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed Americans simply do not want jobs anymore.  We saw this once again in March.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 600,000 Americans dropped out of the labor market during that month alone.  That pushed the labor force participation rate down  to 63.3%, which is the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.  So please don’t believe the hype.  The sad truth is that there has been no jobs recovery whatsoever.

Continue reading »

Tags: Collapse, Economy, Global News, Society, U.S., Unemployment

- The Country Is Over (Monty Pelerin’s World, April 5, 2013):

Data are hard to deal with when your vision is on the wrong side of it. Those wanting to claim there is a recovery underway are having just this problem. These people either have no understanding of economics or they believe falsely that they can inflate “animal spirits” with their hyped reports and that will initiate a recovery.

There will not be an economic recovery given the economic policies of this country. A recovery is not unlikely, I would argue it is closer to impossible if not impossible. The reasons for this position are not complicated. In short, the nation has become an out-of-control welfare state that is rapidly destroying the incentives to work or create jobs. Government policies appear designed toward this end. One doesn’t need a high IQ or  an advanced degree in economics to understand the problems.

There are innumerable factors responsible for the decline of the US. Only three important ones will convey why the economy is dying: Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bonds, Debt, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Government, Obama administration, Obamacare, Politics, U.S., Unemployment