BAD ECONOMIC NEWS:

The number of people out of work in Spain has passed the two million mark making it unlikely the unemployment rate will fall below 10 percent this year.

In August the number of registered unemployed rose by 29,693 compared with the month before.

This took the total number of jobless to 2,019,110 and made the overall unemployment rate still more than ten percent.

July saw similar figures; approximately 30,000 people increasing the ranks of unemployed. This is extremely worrisome, since traditionally it's the two months were employment has always rocketed basically for temporary work in the tourist industry. The fact that this year, for the first time on two decades (last time it happened was in the midst of a brutal recession) the registeres unemployment has risen sharply could be linked to the immigrant amnesty early this year: one of the requirements for being a legal immigrant was to be employed, but the contracts usually were very short term. So we could be seeing simply the effect of this contracts expiring.

Then again, this could mark a disturbing underlying trend to add up to almost all economic indicators (except GDP growth), which are all deteriorating fast.


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