NEW YORK | At 27 years old, Andrew Legrand doesn’t own a house nor a luxurious car. And yet he has over $100,000 in student debt. He graduated from law school in Florida last June but he still hasn’t started to pay off his bills. As he explains to The Corner, he feels anxious that the clock is running. “I didn’t have any debt prior to school. Now I owe $100k…
NEW YORK | U.S. investors are looking forward to this Thursday’s jobless claims figures after the pretty lame monthly jobs report last week. Wall Street needs a sweetener, otherwise investors will keep on the sidelines of the stockmarkets. Only a better than expected (366,000 new jobless claims) figure could boost U.S. market and economical confidence. Indeed, last Friday’s report was shocking: America is creating employment almost at the same rate…
MADRID | Employment creation figures in the US disappointed Wall Street expectations for April, with 115,000 versus 165,000 and a fall of the jobless rate of 0.1 percent to 8.1 percent. Afi analysts in Madrid checked deeper into the subject and concluded in an investor’s note that income per working hour and working hours per week have both been flat, so growth recorded in salary costs was the consequence of…
MADRID | The number of unemployment benefit claimants in Spain in April fell by 6,632, bringing the total down to 4,744,235 people according to data released Friday by the ministry of Employment and National Insurance. Although this is the first decline in eight months, analysts pointed out that the little improvement in unemployment figures was mainly due to temporary hiring during Easter and was lower than expected. On average, experts polled…
LONDON | The Confederation of British Industry said Thursday that household spending will remain subdued, with weak wage growth and unemployment rising to a peak of 2.86 million in the first quarter of 2013. The CBI published its latest quarterly forecast in a somehow hopeful tone, though, voicing prospects of inflation improving next year with further falls, and disposable incomes beginning to recover. The business association pointed out that recent…
LONDON | The cost of too many layoffs made during a steep crisis could leave a wide range of businesses unable to board the pick up economic train. So either it is optimism in the medium term or an honest belief in the coalition government’s mantra ‘we are all in this‘, but research from insurance firm More Than revealed Wednesday how small business owners are going to extraordinary lengths to…
MADRID | Analysts at Barclays said Tuesday in a report that they are less than convinced that the productive capacity of the US economy, the famous output gap, is as large as the Federal Reserve believes. And the consequences of this realisation spell further trouble for any global economic recovery. According to Barclays experts in Madrid, once investors acknowledge that China’s GDP is slowing and that the stimulus measures may…
LONDON | Jobless rates gave Monday a nasty reminder of an ongoing credit crisis whose effects seem to have depressed further the economies in the developed countries. The euro area (EA17) seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 10.8% in February 2012, compared with 10.7% a month earlier. It was 10.0% in February 2011. The EU27 unemployment rate was 10.2% in February 2012, compared with 10.1% in January. It was 9.5% in February 2011. The statistical…
LONDON | The future is an economic frightening sight for the younger generations in the UK. Up to 79% of Britons anticipate their income as pensioners will be too low or inflation will erode their savings. Only 26% of people believe they will be better off than their parents when they retire. A survey released Wednesday by Vision Critical shows that more than 17.2 million of British people think their personal finances…
A working paper by professor José Luis Mechea on possible exit scenarios from the current international economic crisis brings this already known but not fully appreciated picture. Here you are how unit labour costs have evolved since 1999 in a few euro zone countries, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, in comparison to Germany. Obviously, there must be some link with this other graphic… Yes. Unemployment.