On Tuesday, April 14^th, the Greek Labor Minister Fani Pali-Petralia announced that the unemployment in Greece is 9.5% or in other words 470 thousand people. This number shows a growth of nearly one percent since December 2008. According to the Minister, the worst damaged sectors are the tourism and construction ones. Meanwhile, New Democracy announced a plan to invest ?2.5 billion in programs for decreasing unemployment by increasing the loans of tourist operators.

According to Financial Times, Greek hotel owners will have to plan discounts of 15 to 20 percent in order to keep up with the Turkish and Croatian competition, which is preferred in a time of recession. The financial daily newspaper quotes the President of the hotel owners in Western Crete, who claims that some of his colleagues are offering discounts of up to 40% in order to be able to have tourists during summer. A big decrease in the number of tourists is expected from the biggest clients of Greek tourism – Germany and Great Britain, who are in deep recession.

Though, this does not seem to bother investors and the Greek stock exchange index continued to grow, closing last week with a growth of 4.8%, which brought to stock exchange to nearly 2000 points. We would like to remind that just two months ago, the stock exchange hit its lowest point of 1469 points.

Last week, Dow Jones closed with 8140 points – growth of 1.8%. This did not continue for long, because the bad financial results for the first three months of 2009 scared investors and the index dropped with 3.5% and closed with 7841 points. Among the hundreds of companies, which will announce its results this week are big names like Microsoft, Boeing, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Bank of America. The same fate also had the London exchange FTSE 100, which closed last week with a growth of 3% but yesterday there was a drop of about 2.6%.

The Athens exchange index was trading with a loss of 4.11% today. New Democracy needs good news. According to some political researches, its government is losing with about 4% from PASOK.