The Eurozone is in recession because it is an exporting bloc and its' key markets (not least countries like Britain) are just not buying. You would hardly know it from reading the British press but the Eurozone as a whole still has a TRADE SURPLUS with the rest of the world. When was the last time that Britain ran a trade surplus? The 1980's? Yet this article (and hundreds like it) paint a picture of a frustrated UK economy, raring to go, just waiting for an enfeebled Eurozone to buck its ideas up. It’s back-to-front new-speak garbage - the Eurozone will be out of recession the moment its customer countries (like Britain) start buying again.
You can’t suddenly decide to have an export-led economy when a crisis hits and it’s clear that your financial and services sectors are a parasitic dud or that running an economy based on bumping house prices and buying from each other is a daft Ponzi scheme. Manufacturing reputations take decades to establish and Britain comprehensively trashed its reputation in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s with crap products and poor leadership.
The entire world economy is in trouble right now and every country is hoping that ‘exporting’ will dig it out of a hole. That’s why Japan has just pledged to rubbish the value of its currency and invite inflation in through the front door. Britain trashed the value of the pound against the Euro as soon as the crisis hit, but as a net importer, it has only served to stoke the deficit.
There is a bigger picture here which has a lot to do with global energy availability (don't believe the recent 'revolutionary' shale hype, it's yet more PR garbage), landfill consumerism and environmental awareness. We can see that with even a relatively modest drop in demand, the world economy comes crashing to a halt. Yet for the sake of the environment, demand for all kinds of useless, pointless consumer crap needs to collapse still further…much, much further.
The ‘return to growth’ mantra is getting boring and showing up humanity as an uncreative, unimaginative race of lemmings. Actually, on second thoughts, I credit lemmings with more sense...
Dixon at Commerzbank says politicians will have to give up on the idea of a quick fix: "There's been a realization among policymakers that we're not going to get the typical V-shaped recovery, and the sooner we all get used to that, the better. You get seven fat years and then you get seven lean years, as the Bible says: it's not a new phenomenon."Is that the Gideon's Bible?