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Risk is still a global chain reaction, a domino effect of bank failures across Europe, bringing down weak eurozone countries and eventually spreading to Wall Street.
Spanish Stocks Rise on News of $125 Billion Bailout
Spanish stocks rose Monday morning after news that Spain is the latest eurozone country to get a financial bailout to the tune of $125 billion (100 billion euros).
Courtesy of Artsilense/Shutterstock.com
Eurozone finance ministers issued the line of credit to the Spanish government to rescue banks and an economy still devastated after the collapse of a real estate bubble.
But experts say it likely will not be enough to fix Spain’s deep economic problems.
In Terrassa, outside of Barcelona, protestors tried to stop the eviction of a family that has fallen behind on its mortgage. The father, Ghalil Anzeroval, says “I want to work. I want to be able to pay a mortgage.”
What some call a recession is, in Spain, a full-blown depression that is hitting young people and young families the hardest.
In Spain, the unemployment rate is 24.4 percent — close to the level in the United States during the great depression. But the unemployment rate for Spaniards under the age of 25 is an incredible 51 percent, the highest in Western Europe, even higher than Greece. It has created a “Lost Generation” of 20-somethings with very bleak prospects ahead of them.
For a lot of Spaniards, the euro has simply been a headache, making life more expensive, driving businesses under and keeping other businesses from recovering.
On the outskirts of Barcelona, you can see the cemetery of Spain’s shattered real estate bubble: buildings once under construction, now abandoned — gravestones of a boom era that vanished.
The collapse of the real estate market pushed Spain over the edge and into depression. Now, Barcelona blogger Santiago Perez runs a website called “The New Poor,” where Spain’s Lost Generation can share their struggles. His friend Eric Lluent has already decided to leave Spain for Iceland.
Perez says “We have no prospects. It is very difficult to plan your life here so we are now thinking of moving abroad. It is paradoxical how the crisis has changed our points of view so fast and radically at once.”
Perez says “We have no prospects. It is very difficult to plan your life here so we are now thinking of moving abroad. It is paradoxical how the crisis has changed our points of view so fast and radically at once.”
Economist Peter Morici says Spain’s bailout will not not be enough. “We could easily see Europe slip into great depression type conditions.
And the risk is still a global chain reaction, a domino effect of bank failures across Europe, bringing down weak eurozone countries and eventually spreading to Wall Street.
Robert Brusca, founder of the Manhattan-based consulting firm, Fact and Opinion Economics, said Europe’s economic downturn could spread.
“We could be easily pulled into this vortex. It wouldn’t take that much to tip the U.S. economy over,” Brusca said.