I was reading yesterday that the unemployment rate in Greece has risen to 21%. In Spain it is something like 20%. In the UK it hit a 17-year high recently (Conservative-led government, should anyone be surprised? The Thatcher tradition is alive and well and has the unemployment stats to match!).
Government coffers are empty, so government employees are being laid off. Given the current debt crisis, this sounds logical ("acceptable" is not a word I could or would use in this context, though).
Eventually though successful capitalist economies should be driven by wealth creating private companies - or so the conservatives tell me.
So why is the private sector not rushing out to sign up all this available talent, and expand their operations - and when unemployment is at this level, you can be certain that there are a lot of very talented people available (and people filling in in temporary self-employed roles like myself would fit the"very talented" label as well)?
Maybe the story yesterday that JP Morgan has lost massive sums of money gambling unwisely will help to explain it. The lessons of 2008 have not been learned (large numbers of people in the US think Romney would be a good President, and he will not even acknowledge that the 2008 crisis occurred!).
We shouldn't look to governments to provide solutions?
Well as it seems that we cannot look to the private sector either - whether to provide worthwhile jobs for talented people or to conduct their own businesses sensibly with a long-term view - then where do we turn? And when you realise that only 6% of all new businesses are profitable, avoid giving me the old chestnut about self-employment, that is more often than not the road to personal ruin!
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