by Calculated Risk on 4/25/2009 08:55:00 AM

From The Times: Spain's unemployment rate leaps to record high

According to the country's National Statistics Institute a record high figure of 17.4 per cent were unemployed in the first quarter of the year.

Unemployment leapt from 13.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008, the biggest quarterly jump since 1976. Joblessness in Spain has almost doubled in a year.
...
Dominic Bryant, an economist with BNP Paribas, said: “The momentum is clearly there for something well above 20 per cent, it's odds on, really. My forecast is that it gets to something around about 23 per cent.”

And in Britain, from the Telegraph: British economy shrinks at fastest pace for 30 years during first quarter of 2009

Gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 1.9pc in the first quarter ... a sharper decline than the 1.6pc fall in the final quarter of 2008 when Britain officially entered recession.

It was the sharpest quarterly fall in GDP since 1979, when it fell by 2.4pc in the third quarter.

In the U.S. the headline GDP number is the real (inflation adjusted) quarterly change, seasonally adjusted at an annual rate (SAAR). In Britain and the EU, the headline GDP number is the real quarterly change, but it is not the annual rate. So a 1.9% decline in the U.K. is about the same as a 7.6% decline (SAAR) in the U.S. Ouch!