Archief - In de marge van het economische nieuws

The number of unemployed workers in Spain fell below 4m for the first time in almost six years, offering valuable political ammunition to acting prime minister Mariano Rajoy only three weeks before a repeat of December’s inconclusive national elections.

The Spanish leader has been hoping to turn voter attention from the raft of corruption scandals affecting his party, the centre-right Partido Popular, or PP, and exploit improvements in his country’s battered economy. To do so, he has been especially eager to show that Spain’s bedraggled labour market has improved under his watch.

“For the first time since 2010, unemployment has fallen below four million people,” Mr Rajoy wrote on Twitter when the data were released. “A good number. The chosen path is the right one. We continue forward.”

The data from the labour ministry show that in May the number of unemployed workers fell almost 120,000, to 3.9m, the lowest figure since August 2010, while the number of workers registered with the social security administration rose 198,000 to 17.7m, also a six-year high.

“It’s a positive number for the Spanish people,” said Fátima Báñez, labour minister. “It’s a number to be celebrated because the effort of all of Spanish society is opening an era of employment and hope. Spain is moving forward and employment is going well.”

The positive job numbers come a day after the PP’s historic opponent, the centre-left PSOE socialist party, was hit by the indictment of two long-term leaders in a corruption probe in Andalusia.

Pablo Simón, a visiting professor of political science at the Carlos III University in Madrid and an editor at the political blog Politikon, said that the news on unemployment fits with Mr Rajoy’s strategy of positioning the PP as the party of stability and economic recovery.

“The economic data reinforces the idea that the PP is the more secure force to fix the economy,” he said. “The data can be exploited to sell the idea of good economic management.”

Still, Spain’s crisis-hit labour market is far from healthy and the opposition parties are likely to use the employment data to suggest Mr Rajoy’s economic policies have failed, said Marcel Jansen, a professor of economy at Madrid’s Autónoma University.

“The discussion in the elections will be the quantity/quality pay-off,” Prof Jansen said. “The governing party will talk about the job-intensive nature of the recovery. But if we look at the jobs created, we know that these are very precarious jobs. There is a boom in jobs that last a day or a week.”

Indeed, 1.7m labour contracts were signed in May, but only 146,000 of them were open-ended. Much of the hiring can be attributed to preparations for the summer tourist boom and “enormous” rotation in the labour market, Prof Jansen noted.

Despite the better monthly data on employment, Spain is still grappling with the problem of long-term joblessness.

“We still need more effort to bring people into the labour market, especially those who’ve been out for the long term,” said Prof Jansen. “An astonishing 9.5 per cent of active labour market force, slightly more than 2m people, has been out of the labour market for more than two years.”

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Whit zei:

Gereglementeerde boekenprijs vanaf voorjaar 2017

Dit van een Open VLD-minister. Schandalig.

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Hiring by US employers slowed last month to the weakest pace since 2010, clouding the economic picture and dealing a blow to the prospects for a Federal Reserve rate increase this month.

Non-farm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 in May, below a revised 123,000 figure for April and well below expectations for growth of about 160,000. Employers took on 59,000 fewer workers in March and April than previously reported.

The unemployment rate slid to 4.7 per cent from 5 per cent but the declines were driven by people quitting the labour force, rather than buoyant hiring. In a worrying signal, the number of people working part-time because they could not find a full-time post rose by 468,000.

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Badger zei:

https://next.ft.com/content/86c1f79e-2983-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89

Er zijn minder jobs dan verwacht bijgekomen in de VS. Misschien toch geen rentestijging deze maand

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Whit zei:

Neen, minder "Inequality For All" kijken en meer voor zelfbeschikkingsrecht zijn.
Wat heb je aan geld dat niemand nog gaat willen gebruiken?

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Badger zei:

Je kan idd argumenteren dat de rijken proportioneel minder uitgeven en meer herverdeling beter is voor de vraag. Maar dat is geldig op de KT.

Op de lange termijn zorgt meer sparen (wat de rijkeren dus meer doen) voor een grotere kapitaalvoorraad en meer economische groei op de lange termijn. Er wordt in zowat elk land te weinig gespaard, zelf Japan

Voor de geïnteresseerden:
https://www.google.be/url?sa=t&rct=...2OFMfv4H1Obd1H5FA&sig2=vbZ7_WVBeBjyAvVwI_CoDQ

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When, in April, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, sharply criticised the policies of the European Central Bank, he was expressing a distinctive macroeconomic approach which shapes the views of German economists and policymakers alike. It is based on the strong conviction that problems of aggregate demand are of secondary importance as long as prices are sufficiently flexible. This explains the German insistence on structural reform as the solution to almost all economic problems and the quasi-religious fixation on the “black zero”, the balanced fiscal budget with no red ink.

On the face of it, this German exception in macroeconomics is difficult to explain. Students in Germany read the same textbooks as their counterparts in other countries, and in advanced studies the same economic models are used. But behind the textbooks and models lies an economic philosophy called “Ordnungspolitik” which is not found outside Germany. Its guiding spirit is Walter Eucken, who taught at Freiburg university until his death in 1950. In a recent speech marking what would have been Eucken’s 125th birthday, Angela Merkel, the chancellor, insisted that the principles of the “Freiburg school” remained relevant.

There were two aspects to Eucken’s economic philosophy, one positive, the other negative. On the positive side was a commitment to freedom of contract, open markets, private property and robust antitrust policy. On the negative side was a rejection of Keynesianism.

From the experience of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes drew the conclusion that active demand management is necessary. Eucken, by contrast, believed that “full employment” policy of the sort advocated by Keynes would lead to a centrally planned economy. And while Keynes saw the Great Depression as the result of the inherent instability of the market economy, Eucken attributed it to an insufficient flexibility of wages and an inadequate monetary order. In his view, flexible prices and wages and an adequate monetary order were a reliable antidote to market instability.

In his aversion to the pursuit of full employment through fiscal policy, Mr Schäuble is an obvious heir to Eucken. This is also true of prominent German economists who, during the eurozone crisis, have ignored the effects of austerity on demand, out of a deep-seated belief that structural reforms can solve all problems.

How has such a narrow economic paradigm survived for so long in Germany? The answer is simple: German economic policy using this approach has been quite successful. But this is only because Germany’s economy, despite its size, is extremely open. The ratio of exports to gross domestic product is 46 per cent. In Japan, the figure is 18 per cent and 13 per cent in the US.

This openness allows Germany to pursue a passive macroeconomic policy at home and benefit from active demand-side policies pursued in other countries. About 60 per cent of the German current account surplus is with the US, the UK, France and Italy, which all have relatively high fiscal deficits. In short, Germany’s economy is supported by the demand management policies of countries that are heavily criticised by German academics and policymakers.

From a global perspective, this freeriding on the demand policies of other countries is questionable enough. But the German approach becomes positively dangerous when politicians try to apply policies which can work in isolation in a very open economy to a large and not very open currency area like the eurozone. In the present situation of chronic demand deficiency, insisting on the “black zero” for large currency areas, or even at the global level, would create a black hole in the world economy.

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Whit zei:

Opinie: Pink Lady, de rotte appel van de vrijhandel | Milieu | De Morgen

Weer een pareltje van een persoon zonder economische achtergrond die een platform aangereikt wordt. De conclusie is natuurlijk dat we extra overheidsinmenging nodig hebben:



De eigen economie wordt natuurlijk helemaal niet geschaad. Het is zelfs omgekeerd: doordat we elders appels goedkoper kunnen verkrijgen, blijft er meer geld over om aan andere zaken uit te geven. Verder komt Pink Lady uit Australië, wat inhoudt dat euro's naar Australië vloeien. Dat geld wordt dan gebruikt om Europese producten te kopen.

Wouter Torbeyns wil hogere prijzen voor de consument en een hogere werkloosheid.

Jammer dat men vrijwel nooit bronnen meegeeft, ik had graag wat studies rond de volgende uitspraak gezien:

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Volgens informatie van De Tijd zou Jeroen Piqueur, hoofdaandeelhouder van Optima Bank en voorzitter van de raad van bestuur via ongewoon hoge kostennota's en facturen voor fictieve diensten belangrijke bedragen uit Optima Bank hebben weggesluisd.

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Whit zei:

Opinie: Pink Lady, de rotte appel van de vrijhandel | Milieu | De Morgen

Weer een pareltje van een persoon zonder economische achtergrond die een platform aangereikt wordt. De conclusie is natuurlijk dat we extra overheidsinmenging nodig hebben:



De eigen economie wordt natuurlijk helemaal niet geschaad. Het is zelfs omgekeerd: doordat we elders appels goedkoper kunnen verkrijgen, blijft er meer geld over om aan andere zaken uit te geven. Verder komt Pink Lady uit Australië, wat inhoudt dat euro's naar Australië vloeien. Dat geld wordt dan gebruikt om Europese producten te kopen.

Wouter Torbeyns wil hogere prijzen voor de consument en een hogere werkloosheid.

Jammer dat men vrijwel nooit bronnen meegeeft, ik had graag wat studies rond de volgende uitspraak gezien:

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Whit zei:

Laat hen protectionistische maatregelen treffen, het komt enkel ons ten goede uiteindelijk. Noem het reverse foreign aid in het geval van exportsubsidies bv.

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Whit zei:

Dus? Iedereen moet dan maar aan protectionisme doen? Je haalt zelf aan dat het een race to the bottom is. Wat wil je nu juist zeggen?

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Whit zei:

Door meer overheidsinmenging. Hoe juist? Vergeet verder niet dat de almachtige overheid niet immuun is aan externaliteiten (iets wat veel mensen 'vergeten').

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