Spanish Business

Shocking unemployment figure for 2009 in Spain – 3,923,603 officially unemployed people. This follows the New York Times’s exposé of Spanish youth unemployment last week, which now stands at 42.9% of young people between the ages of 16 and 24.

The New York Times has published an article on Spain’s soaring youth unemployment rate, which it says has increased from 17.5% three years ago to 42.9% this year. That would means that the recession has more than doubled the number of young people on the dole in Spain.

Have you got your head around how the BA-Iberia merger will benefit passengers yet? The FT has profiled chief executive Willie Walsh, who more or less seems a little bit clearer, perhaps, about all the confusion.

If you were a doctor, what medication would you prescribe for the Spanish economy? Zapatero has a springlike dream but almost everyone else in Spain faces a menacing reality. The Economist offers a harsh diagnosis.

I had dinner last night with a friend who has worked as an accountant for the last twenty years – for the first time since before the long summer and we ended up talking about the state of the Spanish economy, of course. I thought you might be interested in her opinion of things.

For Zapatero, is this just a giant play for votes and power in the 2012 general election, as well as an attempt to avoid a massive general strike or does it somehow run even deeper?

There has been a flurry of small news articles over the last couple of days announcing that new business creation is down by well over 30% pretty much all over Spain in the first six months of 2009. Do politicians have any idea how long it takes to build a company?

Surprise, surprise. Despite the recession, the disappearance of more than 70,000 estate agencies and the hundreds of thousands of newly-unemployed builders, the Spanish economy is still high on bricks and building sites, falling just 0.6% to 10.3% of GDP.

UBS has published a report that doesn’t invite mid-term optimism for the Spanish economy: house prices could fall 20% and unemployment could reach 25%. Two former Prime Ministers have joined the regional battle over building society restructuring.

The green shoots exist in the UK, according to June’s purchasing managers confidence survey, but they’re not growing very quickly. Meanwhile, the British government will pony up €500m to try and save 5,000 British GM jobs.