According to official statistics, Spain's jobless rate reached 17.4%, with slightly more than four million people unemployed. The figures have doubled over the past twelve months, the National Statistics Institute reports.

The numbers are an increase over the previous jobless rate of 13.9%, which was revised in the fourth quarter of last year. Spain now has the highest level of unemployment in the European Union.

Recently, the Bank of Spain estimated that the unemployment rate in the country could go up to 19.4% by 2010.

Leaders and central banks in Russia, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Kazakhstan have called for an international currency system.

Speaking on April 1 in advance of the G-20 summit in London, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev argued that the international finance system needed a "new construction" including "new currency systems", saying that such a new system could be the purpose of a revamped IMF and World Bank. The IMF was originally founded in 1946 as the overseer of the Bretton Woods system, which from its founding until the 1970s tied the western world's currencies to the US Dollar, which was in turn backed by gold. Russia's proposal was for the new currency to serve as a reserve currency, one which would take the place of the dollar,euro, and other heavily-traded currencies as an international standard of exchange.