STOCK MARKET WATCH - Friday, 27 January 2012

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39. Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-27/spanish-unemployment-rises-to-22-9-.html

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 22.9 percent, the highest in 15 years, increasing pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to deliver on his election pledge to create jobs in a shrinking economy.

The unemployment rate rose in the fourth quarter from 21.5 percent in the previous three months, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said today. That’s more than twice the euro- region average and exceeds the median estimate of 22.2 percent in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts.

Unemployment “is the main source of vulnerability of the Spanish economy and this is something that we hope to start to fix in the short term,” Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said today on Bloomberg Television in Davos, Switzerland. “We have to take a lot of decisions because there are some things that don’t work properly in the labor market in Spain.”

Spain is home to a third of the euro region’s unemployed, according to the European Union’s statistics office, which estimates that half of young Spaniards are out of work. The People’s Party government, which won the Nov. 20 election after a campaign focused on jobs, has promised to overhaul labor and wage rules in the next two weeks to prompt companies to hire.