Spanish unemployment, the highest in Europe, held above 20 percent for the third consecutive quarter, undermining the nation’s recovery from its worst recession in six decades.
The jobless rate fell to 20.9 percent in the second quarter, the National Statistics Institute said yesterday in Madrid, which compared with 21.3 percent in the previous three months and matched the median forecast of six economists in a Bloomberg News survey.
Consumer prices gained 3.1 percent this month from a year earlier after increasing 3 percent last month, the institute said in a separate report.
Spain’s recovery from the collapse of the debt-fueled property bubble is being undermined by the deepest austerity measures in at least three decades as the government aims to narrow the euro region’s third-largest budget deficit to 6 percent of GDP this year from 9.2 percent last year. The unemployment rate has eroded support for the Socialist government, which faces elections by March that polls indicate it will lose.
The government last week decided to temporarily restrict immigration from Romania to those who can show a job contract to ease pressure on the labor market. The length of the restriction will depend on how employment evolves in Spain, Development Minister Jose Blanco said on Friday last week.
Spain has 4.83 million jobless, the survey showed yesterday, the most since the data series started in 1996. That compares with 2.96 million in Germany, a country twice its size. The drop in Spain’s registered unemployment, which fell last month for the third month, is due to a seasonal recovery in the country’s tourist industry.
The government expects the jobless rate to average 19.8 percent this year, the finance ministry said on April 6, compared with a previous forecast of 19.3 percent.
The economy is forecast to expand 1.3 percent this year after two years of contraction, with growth accelerating to 2.3 percent next year and 2.4 percent in 2013, it said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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