By George and all the Saints, the Jerries are in the shit and the PIIGS are sitting pretty in the straw! Who'da thunk it? ...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/11/06/germany-will-lose-grip-eu-economy-gets-much-weaker/
The interesting point, however, is this. It [Germany] is starting to underperform the Mediterranean economies. Italy, helped by prime minister Mario Draghi’s reforms, and a ton of stimulus money, is doing a lot better.
In the latest quarter, Italy’s GDP rose by 2.6pc, almost 50pc faster than Germany (and inflation at 2.6pc is a lot lower as well – no sign of stagflation there).
France is doing better than expected, with resilient GDP growth, stronger than forecast job creation, and rising exports, and while retail sales are sluggish (down 0.2pc last month) it is doing a lot better than in Germany. Likewise, Spain is bouncing back from the pandemic, with factory output rising.
Heck, even Greece is doing a lot better, with growth of more than 7pc forecast for this year. The net result? The imbalances within the eurozone are just as strong as they always have been. It is just that they have switched places.
It is Germany that is emerging as the weakest link, and the Mediterranean states are doing better. And that will reshape the bloc in two important ways.
First, power will shift from Berlin to Paris and Rome. With the departure of Angela Merkel, and her replacement by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz running an unlikely coalition of socialists, greens and free market radicals – a combustible mix if ever there was one – that was always likely to happen.
Next, Germany won’t be able to preach austerity anymore, nor will lectures on spendthrift Mediterraneans hold much sway. It is easy to tell everyone else what they are doing wrong when you run the strongest economy. It is a lot harder when you are one of the weakest.
I've often wondered why the EU's economic core was in the middle North and not at the periphery. All other things being equal the shortest distance to other markets for sales and purchases is where you'd expect capital and labour to coalesce, like the US.
But all other things weren't equal. The central North was well run and the periphery a shambles. But in the Single Market, Four Freedoms, and State Aid Rules that gravity defying start point can't last. Especially when the grip of a single currency with austerity and internal devaluation as the obligatory and only means of righting national ships imposes itself on the feckless periphery for a few decades to bring them into line with Teutonic righteousness.
Are we about to see the inversion of europe: the shift of power and control away from the central Northern core to the city states of the periphery? What a glorious, fantastic place that would be, a neo-Greek phoenix rising from the ashes of Teutonic dominance.
And if we'd still been in the Great Game of europe in its current incarnation of the EU, as the ultimate peripheral nation and super-City State with all the finance of the City of London behind us we'd be top dog of the city states: the Athens of the second renaissance, the Venice of the second age of Enlightenment.
Instead ... Good call 23/06/2016.
Muppets.
SoD
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