Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It's almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years. You can see this 1930s-style catastrophe in the chart below from the National Statistics Institute.
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...the real story of the Spanish depression has been the story of the indignados: the mostly young, long-term unemployed. It's a bit hard to see just how dramatic it's been in the chart above, so I converted it to a line chart below. Almost all of the increase in unemployment since 2010 has been due to the increase in long-term unemployment of two years or more...
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In other words, unemployment is a trap people fall into, but can't fall out of... That is what a permanent underclass looks like.
This debt-fueled madness will, of course, end in war and misery -- as it has throughout human history.
"NO ONE TELL PAUL KRUGMAN OR HENRY BLODGET: "Spain Is Beyond Doomed""
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