EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner Joaquin Almunia is telling us that the European economy is showing some positive signs that it is closer to a recovery than before. "Looking at some indicators in Europe," he says, "some of them are sending us some positive signals, (but) it is not yet evident that we will start a recovery tomorrow. We still have a lot of difficult tasks ahead of us, but some positive indicators are indeed welcome." Almunia adds that, "If we are not yet in a recovery, at least we are closer to the bottom, and closer to the beginning of the recovery than we were."

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Great minds think alike..

http://peteslettersfromlimbo.blogspot.c ... rking.html

The idea that the European economy will recover soon is laughable. Ditto for the American economy. What people have got to realize is that things will never really be the same as before. Europe is too aged, too taxed, too unfree, too regulated, too riven by social troubles, and too socialist to ever resume anything like decent growth again. Ever.

The US has (or I should say had) a chance to escape the debt-deflation spiral, but alas we've decided to ape European social and economic policies, and hence twist the knife in a bit further.

The idea that China will save us all is sheer folly. Contrary to popular belief, Chinese demographics make long-term prosperity there unlikely. Most people don't realize that the median Chinese is almost as old (34.1) as the median American (36.7). In fact, a greater proportion of America's population falls in the 0-14 age group (20.2%) than China's (19.8%). In short, China is too old to develop a dynamic consumer economy.

Anyone who thinks that the eurozone is on the way back up hasn't the insight of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today's Telegraph! He focusses mainly on Germany but also on the eurozone and he repeats his earlier warning that because of the different structure of bank lending the real crash in Germany is still in the future and it will be very nasty. Civil unrest he believes almost inevitable.

No time for more precis - must turn attention to how to survive now that we HAVE gone over the cliff!

Most Europeans don't actually know their demographic decline is almost as severe as Russia's.

If Armageddon's pile of suppositions is anywhere near right, it strengthens the argument that the Germans cannot / will not bail out the weak eurozone countries and that the eurozone will not survive at its present size.

It's not supriseing that it is so hard to see what will happen, as no-one in authority is telling the truth, or dealing with the real problems.

The problems remain in the banks, ie: all the toxic derivatives and they are getting worse, not better, so before too long more money will be needed and it will be huge amounts. They are not being dealt with in any sane manner, as the bankers have managed to persuade our idiot government to cover the losses, which in the short term also allows McSnot to get away with his hopeless past and present management of the banks. But the bills will keep pileing up until either we as a country go bust, or someone sane takes over and cancels the problem derivatives and puts the crooks who created all this stuff in jail for fraud.

One of the next shoes to drop will be a rise in longterm interest rates, due to the huge borrowing requirements of not just our cretins, but all the others, these are rates that the government cannot control and quantative easing will make worse. This will drive many more people with mortgages into default and wreck even further what is left of the economy. A rise in long rates will also cause more credit card defaults along with vehicle finance, much of which has been securitised and will therefore kick of even more derivative bombs.

I could go on and mention what riseing rates will do to Commercial Property, which too is full of highly leveraged punters and in case anyone thinks rates can't rise, they are today as I write this.

In short nothing has changed and nothing is being done to deal with what is really wrong, we are instead being fed garbage and spin, by the very people that either caused it all, or who allowed it all to happen and anyone seeing green shoots....well I'm not sure they have grown the skunk strong enough to create those delusions.