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Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

theatlantic.com

71–80 of 108 posts

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#71
Just anecdotal stuff,

Friends in Greece who work for the government have not been paid for 6 - 9 months. But they stay in the job for whenever the pay day does come.

Friends in Spain work for cash in hand because their potential employers save money on the various social insurance costs they have to put up, but cannot afford because times are tight.

Local mid size companies are using the down turn as a great excuse to let people go, while pushing their own salary up. (Noted from friends who work in payroll who have access to that kinda info)

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#72
post #2

Interesting, how Germany decoupled itself from the rest of Europe in this graph.

This is direct result of Euro currency - the strongest economy gets even stronger. Greece, Spain, etc. were producing low quality goods, but they were cheap. Now they are as expensive as better German products. That's why sane governments (UK, Sweden) stay away from Euro - not to kill export.

Clever move from Germany and prescription for the disaster (collapse of EU - that' optimistic and would help Europe to recover, or less optimistic like war) when people realize how they were cheated.

Greece, despite misarable situation, is still buying war ships... from Germany.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#74
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there is still debate about the benefit/drawbacks of austerity, but if Europe is any indication, it is just degrading the whole situation. What's keeping Europe away from the edge or from a turn to prosperity is the hard-nosed devotion to austerity.

Ah yes, if the troubled European nations would just spend a lot more money they don't actually have while not paying off any of their debts, while pretending they could ever afford the vast welfare states they built, they would find themselves prosperous again. Keynesian faith based economics at its finest. Spend what you don't have, run up debts you can never pay back, and print your way deeper into destruction when…

Are we just going to pretend that Keynesian economics is some obviously foolhardy strategy and hasn't worked repeatedly in the past? It is understood to have worked with particularly great effect in Australia following the GFC.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the well runs deep, doesn't mean it's right to steal water from it, unearned.

In the end capital ownership and property rights are just concepts we've collectively agreed are legitimate. Once living conditions become dystopian and wealth inequality skyrockets even more than it already has, I suspect society will legitimize "stealing" from the well. Notably, the well doesn't care whether or not you steal water from it. The water was never 'owned' by it in the first place.

I agree that ownership and property rights are an invention - though one of a free society. And you are correct that society can just as easily decide that these rights are no longer valid, though that is not a society I would ever consider free. To a certain extent that is happening already. The day the individual is forced to give up his last right and his last dollar to the ugly greed of the 'collective good' will be a sad day indeed.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#77
post #32

Youths with nothing to lose are how bloody revolutions start, rarely turning out well for any involved. I find one thing about the unemployment rate in Europe truly scary: There are a /lot/ of youths there with nothing to lose.

Nope. Revolution needs some "force in the middle" - the poor, lazy an uninterested will not start revolution. French revolution was not started by poor people, but by "middle class" who was not able to extend its wealth and influence because of ruling oligarchy (all these barons, etc). The poor were used by them, but were not the driving force.

I am not sure that among young, comfortable, teached from kindergarden about tolerance, socialistic version of human rights there is enough energy to start anything (like making mind effort not to choose stupid and promising every for free politicians).

The intellectual condition of european youth is rather poor. Spaniards have choosen socialistic government who was dealing with important stuff like human rights for monkeys. Go figure...

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#78
it's bad, but not as bad as these stats make it seem.

a lot of those youths do have jobs, but simply are paid cash in hand. when asked, they are unemployed for tax and insurance reasons. as long as illegal immigrant workers are working on the fields of spain, uneomployment simply cannot be that bad.

nobody is starving. roads, bars, stadiums are full. money is circulating in the system. it just is black, untaxed.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#79

Just anecdotal stuff, Friends in Greece who work for the government have not been paid for 6 - 9 months. But they stay in the job for whenever the pay day does come. Friends in Spain work for cash in hand because their potential employers save money on the various social insurance costs they have to put up, but cannot afford because times are tight. Local mid size companies are using the down turn as a great excuse t…

I don't think the cash in hand thing is happening in Portugal which is kind of surprising giving the small salary you get per month and the amount of taxes you pay now. Maybe they have some catch up to do.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#80
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there is still debate about the benefit/drawbacks of austerity, but if Europe is any indication, it is just degrading the whole situation. What's keeping Europe away from the edge or from a turn to prosperity is the hard-nosed devotion to austerity.

Ah yes, if the troubled European nations would just spend a lot more money they don't actually have while not paying off any of their debts, while pretending they could ever afford the vast welfare states they built, they would find themselves prosperous again. Keynesian faith based economics at its finest. Spend what you don't have, run up debts you can never pay back, and print your way deeper into destruction when…

No offense, but this comment betrays a very limited understanding of the situation.

First of all, the European countries with the strongest welfare states do just fine. Also, social expenditures are not actually much different in the United States compared to EU countries -- it's just that more of it comes out of pocket [1]; in the end, it still comes out of your paycheck (as an employee) or profit (if self-employed). In fact, the US has higher net social expenditures than Spain (as a percentage of GDP).

Second, money creation does not work the way you understand it. The majority of what economists call the M2 money supply is not created by the government or the central bank, but by private banks through fractional reserve banking [2], i.e. loans.

And as a matter of fact, the M2 money supply [3] in Greece [4] and Spain [5] has cratered in recent years. The private banks have been "unprinting" money, if you like that terminology. While in theory this might have come from money being transferred to Germany etc., money supply growth across the Eurozone as a whole has also slowed down since the crisis [6], as opposed to the US [7]. Note that it is normal for the money supply to grow with the economy, even absent inflation, because M2 (= money in circulation) is an indirect indicator of economic activity.

Finally, much as "printing money" is favored as a term by some people, this is not actually what Quantitative Easing is. What Quantitative Easing does (simplifying a bit) is a central bank making loans in lieu of the private banks when the latter fail to do so in sufficient measure. The QE process has the central bank buying private assets with money it created to compensate for a shortage in the money supply; the crucial difference (compared to printing money) is that the process is easily reversible; when the economy recovers, the central bank sells these assets again and destroys the money it gets back. Thus, the central bank retains control over the total money supply. QE is what the US Fed has been doing to prop up the money supply in recent years because Congress couldn't get its act together.

Borrowing, likewise, is in the current situation in no way comparable to "printing" money. In fact, short term government bonds of most developed countries (T-bills or their equivalent) not called Greece, Spain, or Italy go for yields below the very low inflation rate: investors buy bonds even though they're technically losing money; similarly, those governments could technically make money by borrowing more at the moment because the aforementioned investors are willing to loan it to them at effective negative rates.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2012SocialSpendingDuringTheC... (a convenient chart is on page 8).

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Empirical_measures...

[4] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/greece-money-supply-m...

[5] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/spain-money-supply-m2...

[6] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/euro-area-money-suppl...

[7] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/united-states-money-s...

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