Arguably it could well continue to rise all through 2013, although there is a more pessimistic scenario involving a ceiling being hit as the number of people giving up hope and leaving the country starts to rise even more rapidly than jobs are actually lost.
Familiar With Job Loss
And job loss is a topic Spaniards are now well familiar with. As of the end of March, the unemployment rate hit a level just below the 25 percent mark, while the number of unemployed hit 5.6 million, an all-time high.
Spain's once mighty job creation machine - at one point during the boom years over half the new jobs in the euro area were being created in Spain - has been recycled during the crisis, and is now working flat out as a job destruction one.
Nearly 4 million jobs have now disappeared during the crisis, almost 375,000 of them in the last three months alone. And this is precisely what is worrying Spain's leaders most: as the country's recession deepens, the rate of job loss has been accelerating. Hardly the conditions in which you should be applying a sharp fiscal tourniquet, at least according to the classic manual.
Yet austerity is what Spain is in for over the next two years, and buckets of it. And yet, despite all the talk of a fiscal crisis, and the need to bring down excessive government spending, in its origins the crisis in Spain has little to do with the sort of issues we have seen in Greece or Italy.
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