EU unemployment at 10.4%, India in the dark

The News Brief is going on holiday and will be back on Thursday, August 9, 2012.

Record unemployment and Zara Philips and Milton Friedman as trending topics on Twitter. I guess that’s the world we live in now.

June figures show EU unemployment at 10.4%, with youth unemployment at 22.6%. The eurozone has higher overall unemployment, reaching 11.2%, but is lower on youth unemployment, amounting to 22.4%, just as in May, which had been revised upwards. Germans may be pleased to know that inflation across the eurozone has remained steady at 2.4%.

But the extent of absurdity of EU stats only really becomes clear when considering Austria and Spain with 4.5% and 24.8% unemployment respectively. Many new jobless claims are coming out of France, where Peugeot and Alcatel-Lucent cut a lot of jobs in the past month.

There is not much to report on central bank action yet, except that the Fed is expected to do something, while the ECB has smashed all QE hopes when insiders said decisive action could take another five week. We’ll know more tomorrow.

Meanwhile in Italy, the police seems to have taken documents from Barclay’s Milan office in an investigation into the fixing of the Euribor (Euro Interbank Offered Rate) rate. I was wondering when this was going to happen…

And as all this is going on, India is left in the dark. Literally. You can be the largest democracy in the world all you want, but 670 million people without electricity due to a power grid failure, is kind of an issue. The power cut initially happened yesterday and was fixed before it all collapsed again today.

But back to the Olympics: After scaring the whole city for the better part of 2012, more or less all Londoners have disappeared from the streets. TFL said public transport usage was only up 4% from the norm. And suddenly, the golden games that were going to save this country’s poor economy, might slow it down even further, simply because nobody is here. Stell dir vor es ist London und keiner ist da… read article

Finally, to cheer you up, the most fun SEC filing ever: Manchester United filed for its $383m IPO (click link, scroll down).

So long.

Filed under: news brief, Alcatel-Lucent, Barclays, ECB, energy, EU, Euribor, eurozone, Federal Reserve, France, India, inflation, Libor, London, Olympics, Peugeot, quantitative easing, Twitter, unemployment