It’s getting uglier. Fast.
Brazil’s urban unemployment rate surged to 8.2% in February, with the worsening economy standing as a bleak backdrop to the corruption scandal threatening to bring down the government of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Last February, Brazil’s unemployment rate was 5.8%.
Of course, this isn’t a big surprise. The data out of Brazil has been terrible lately, with retail sales collapsing by roughly 10% in January, for example.
The World Bank estimates that Brazil’s economy will contract by 2.5% this year, which would be the worst forecast of any of the any nations tracked, if not for Brazil’s neighbor Venezuela. Venezuela is expected to contract by 4.8% in 2016, thanks to the collapse in oil prices.