Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
June 04, 2012 at 04:58 AM
Even the influx of tourists during peak travel season has failed to boost Spanish employment out of the doldrums. While more people were working in May than in April, fewer found employment this year than during last year’s tourist season. At the same time, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called for direct aid to banks in need of financial assistance and China sought plans to cope with a Greek exit from the euro zone.
Bloomberg reported Monday that while the number of those registering for unemployment benefits in Spain fell during May by 30,113, a year ago that number was more than twice as large at 79,701. The Labor Ministry data indicated that this May is the worst showing since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008.
Unemployment still lingers above 24%, and with tourism the country’s biggest economic factor, a lack of relief in that sector will make it even harder on the beleaguered country to make the cuts it has mandated in its deficit reduction plan.
“Even seasonal hiring is becoming difficult for cash-strapped Spanish companies,” Thibault Mercier, an economist at BNP Paribas in Paris, said in the report. Added to the country’s bank woes, it appears increasingly likely that Spain will be the next in line for a bailout.
Rajoy’s government, however, said that it was not under pressure from other eurozone countries to seek a rescue package. An unidentified government spokeswoman also denied a report in the newspaper El Pais that Madrid is negotiating for aid from the European Union for its banks that would not be considered a bailout.
On June 2 Rajoy called for funds to come directly to troubled banks rather than being routed through government channels. That added to the push on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to consider a sturdier “banking union” in Europe.
Rajoy encouraged other eurozone member countries to “cede more sovereignty” to a central fiscal authority, and also voiced support for the European Commission’s (EC) call for a banking union that would include a single regulator and a deposit guarantee fund.
Merkel, however, has been steadfastly opposed to any measures that would lead to such things as joint euro bonds, although she has become increasingly isolated in her position as one after another of the eurozone countries have called for growth rather than austerity and a greater financial interdependence among the countries in the bloc.
