Scary chart of the day: Youth unemployment

Outsourced to the Economist:

Notice how much closer the US is to the Eurozone average, and how much below that average Germany is?

BTW, I wonder how much the Germans are kicking themselves for having been so enthusiastic about a common currency:

the truth is dawning in Germany that although hard-pressed taxpayers will not have to pick up the whole price of the new €159 billion refinancing package, they face instead a future of indefinite help to the single currency's weaker and more profligate economies - the cost of a more integrated core of Europe.

While the report says that Germans are split on this issue, I like this anecdotal point:

Ronny Nickel, 61, a construction worker, shook his head in disapproval. "To help them once is OK. But not again and again. We pour money into their system but no one knows where it is going.
"In Greece you can retire young, but we work until we are 67. It's not right. And it's dominoes – they are all falling."
His son Jeremy, 20, an apprentice metal worker, nodded. "What upsets me is that they call us Nazis," he said, showing a newspaper report of how the German consulate in the Greek city of Thessaloniki had been painted with swastikas by protesters.
"That was way before I was born. We've only just stopped paying for the First World War, and it's not right that my generation should be labelled with this too. I used to be very pro Europe, but not any more."