© Getty ImagesGerman Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has warned that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart.
The dreaded r-word came about as some corners push to reform the welfare standards to closely correlate with American standards. This would be a monumental mistake according the German finance minister. Youth unemployment as it stands now across the EU is at 25%, double the rate of older citizens.
Eu countries such as Germany, Italy and France are backing urgent action to tackle the issue before it becomes even more systemic than it already is. Anecdotes out of Spain have college graduates turning 30 without ever having a job. The problem is definitely have a social spillover as evidenced by the riots in Stockholm.
Labor ministers out of Italy are saying that they have the best educated generation and policies are essentially putting their future on hold. Schaeuble told a conference that if US welfare standards were enacted in the EU, the revolution would start the same day. It is completely untenable to adopt that set of rules.
Granted the youth unemployment picture here stateside is not exactly the best. Most of the job creation in recent months have gone to the older populace with the younger generation looking more and more like a carbon copy of an EU nation.
The solutions to the problem are not known, but the central banks willingness to continue the QE policies that have failed to generate any real job growth. If you broke down the amount injected by QE and applied it on a per job it works out to $500k per job created. Enough to give a person a 50k a year salary for ten years. Which is the better model, Dow 15k or systemic unemployment? Not really a trick question.
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