Thursday, November 13, 2008

Unemployment...

The direct result to the financial crisis that has hit most countries and most severely Iceland is the rise of the unemployment figures.

This was not obvious yet as September was only the beginning of the crisis and with most people getting 3 months notice the unemployment figures are not yet relevant.

Everyday brings its lot of bad news about compagnies firing some of their workforce: all staff of the free TV channel Skjár 1 were let go, the electronic stores BT have closed their doors, the financial newspaper Viðskiptablaðið is not published anymore, etc... Even Stöð 2, a paying channel, has stopped presenting the news at lunch time... which is good actually!!! I was getting sick of hearing the same thing over and over and over again.

Yesterday, the Directorate of labour published the figures for the unemployment for October 2008. The unemployment is now at 1.9%, up from 1.3% last month. This is not much but when you look at the overall picture of the unemployment for the past 2 years, this is a big jump.

And the future is bleak as they are predicting the unemployment figure to be between 3.3%-3.8% and December won't be better...

Weather outside: Rain, 3°C

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a few questions about the meltdown and ordinary people on the street.

1. Are banks open for business?

2. Credit Cards and Debit Cards still work?

3. Is it easy to access foreign currency?

4. What is happening to rents? Are prices going up?

Regards,

Bill

Skype: theptcompany

Jujux said...

1) Bank are trading as usual.
2) You can still use credit cards and debit cards
3) Getting foreign currency from the bank is more difficult. You have a limit per day of how much you can withdraw.
4) Rents are going down but prices in general are going up as the Króna is going down and everything is imported.

Anonymous said...

Thank you.

Any words of wisdom for how I can best be prepared for when Canada Melts down?

Bill