Spain's unemployment rate is
rising rapidly. While the labor ministry doesn't give an unemployment rate,
Spanish unemployment stood at 23.6% in February, according to data published
Monday by the European Union's Eurostat agency, more than twice the 10.8%
average rate for the 27 EU members and an increase from the 23.3% rate in
January. Spain's economy is expected to contract 1.7% this year, according to
the government's estimates, and the central government is struggling to balance
demands to slash the country's deficit without hurting economic activity too
heavily. Last week, it announced budget cuts worth more than €27 billion, or
about 2.5% of gross domestic product, through decreases in spending and tax
increases along with other measures. But in an interview Monday with The Wall
Street Journal, Finance Minister Luis de Guindos said the government worries
that cutting the budget too severely could curtail economic growth.
Italy has pledged to eliminate
its budget deficit by 2013, although a senior Treasury official has emphasized
that it has no explicit target for this year. Italy has vowed fiscal
consolidation worth 7% of GDP since 2010 to reach that 2013 target. Underscoring
just how harshly Italy's tax-heavy policies are affecting domestic consumption
was underscored by foreign car dealers association Unrae's report this week that
Italian car sales fell 21% in the first quarter—the biggest season for such
purchases—and March unit sales hit a 32-year low. Prospects are dim. "Consumers
have insurmountable obstacles ahead of them, with higher income tax rates from
March, higher property taxes as of June and a value-added tax hike in
September," said Unrae President Jacques Bousquet. Italy's budget targets are
based on a GDP contraction of only half a percentage point this year and a
modest return to growth in 2013. Late last year Italy, responding to pressure
from European Union officials, installed Mario Monti to head a government of
technical experts. Its first act was to pass a supplementary round of tax
increases and public-spending cuts in December to stay on course to reach its
targets even as growth slowed. The commission's latest warnings from Copenhagen
are identical.
4 comments:
private hospitals, bribes of between €150 and €7,000 for surgery are cited.
Tax officers can charge between €100 and €20,000 to settle an audit and a driver's license can be secured with the added payment of between €40 and €500, the watchdog said.
The survey also found that the average amount of private-sector kickbacks had declined from €1,623 in 2010 to €1,406 last year.
And a significant percentage of respondents - 25.3pc in the public sector and 21.6pc in the private sector - said they had refused to pay the requested bribes, "a hopeful message" according to TI Greece.
Your argument, that net worth per capita somehow paints the true picture
of the state of affairs of a country, is erroneous. Many European
countries e.g. Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Greece etc all have a
higher net worth per capita than Finland, yet today are bust and calling
for bailouts from the group of financially solid European nations, to
which, among others, Finland belongs. What does it say when residents of
countries, that in reality are broke, on paper have - in relation to
their GDP per capita - a disproportionately high net wealth per capita?
To me it says that these numbers do not depict real wealth but rather a
speculative economic bubble, and that the accumulated fake wealth merely
is a sign of an excessive lifestyle, in accordance to which the
residents of such countries have been living beyond their solvent
means.
In Greece, bribes tend to be smaller, more frequent and more open. They also tend to be divided up between teams of people rather than staying in the pocket of just one person.
In other countries, and especially Western countries, bribery tends to be on a much larger scale, extremely secretive and on a one-to-one basis.
Or bribes are seen as a perk of the job and accepted as such by the establishment.
For example, the hundreds of thousands of pounds in the bank accounts of three-times Irish Premier Bertie Ahern were large, secretive and one-to-one payments. The cash wasn't divided up.
Or in the case of British MPs and members of the House of Lords, relatively small amounts falsely claimed over long periods of time were taken for granted as perks of the job. In fact, they were nothing of the kind and constituted theft, but the establishment did not object until the brave Daily Telegraph brought attention to this chronic theft.
Members of the European Parliament also are involved in expenses theft over long periods of time but they are following the lead laid down by west European practice.
Even in business, travel and other expenses are regularly claimed at the tax payer's expense even though they are neither warranted nor legal. These expenses are then offset against profits for tax, depriving the British tax payer of badly needed relief.
How about a survey of the true extent of bribery and corruption around the world and what we actually mean by this? One thing is for certain -- Western European bribes total a heck of a lot more than Mediterranean bribes. Just look at the millions spent by the Germans to sell arms, civil engineering services and electronics. The excellent German judicial system has already unmasked many German companies that have been bribing people around the world for decades. If we look at the Swiss, the British, the French and the Italians, then the sums involved are astronomical.
Mediterranean bribes put into this context are just small fry. The big fish are in Western Europe and the United States.
Am I take it from your response that you deem yourself to be amongst the elite pool of contributors that I call "resident experts"?
It's forbidden by the ECB statutes for it to buy directly bonds.
Joking aside, I didn't know that, but apparently, it's the same in the States with the Fed. But whether they're doing it directly or on the secondary market it effectively amounts to the same thing...
I assume the ECB does have to come out with figures saying we bought X amount of bonds in January, Y in February and did Z LTRO in March? Anyone?
(Despite my x, y, z-ing... I am not looking for more mathematic formulae in response...).
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