Reports of the survival of the eurozone may have been greatly exaggerated
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… Last week’s surprise interest rate cut by the European Central Bank (ECB) may have been taken as good news by the markets, but it was largely a response to the looming danger of deflation in the eurozone. And that is not good news at all.
It is a severe problem of economic forecasting that if you manage to identify a major force that is going to have significant effects, you are rarely able to see quite when these will occur. You can give up, retire or die before the forecast events finally come to pass.
The long-running crisis of the euro is a case in point. Like Mark Twain’s death, forecasts of the euro’s demise have proved premature. Yet at the heart of the simmering crisis lie two debilitating problems with the potential for a devastating interaction. The first is a loss of competitiveness by the peripheral countries, that has left them with depressed levels of GDP and high rates of unemployment. The second is appallingly high government debt.