Just to follow up on my recent long Estonia post, a couple of new data points have caught my attention recently: the sharp rise in Estonian inflation and the ongoing goods trade deficit. Continue reading →

Last Thursday Moody’s Investor Service cut Spain’s Sovereign credit – to Aa1 from AAA – thus removing the last of the country’s highly-valued triple-A ratings. The move really surprised no one – in this case the Moody’s rating could be regarded as a lagging indicator on the health of Spain’s finances – since the two other “majors” (S&Ps and Fitch) had long taken the decision, and the market predictably shrugged off the news, as if to say “what else is new”. But there was one small detail in the report which should have attracted more attention than it has: the agency explicitly stressed that it was the government’s show of determination to reduce its very large fiscal deficit in the near term which influenced their decision to limit the downgrade to just one rating notch, and this was also the reason the rating had been assigned, for the time being, a stable outlook. Which means, of course, that should there be any slippage in that determination, any wearying, or falling asleep at the wheel, then the outlook would rapidly move to negative, and more downgrades could be anticipated. Continue reading →

According to an intriguing article I read in Bloomberg recently an alert signal has been sounded due to the fact that house prices in the Scandinavian countries have been rising very rapidly of late. Judging by what they explain what is now going on in the housing markets of Norway, Sweden and Finland would seem to have all the hallmarks of a “mini-bubble”, one which is all the more perplexing given the lowish level of economic activity which characterises the current environment. But then I asked myself, and those whopping German export numbers we saw in the second quarter, wheren’t they also some kind of “mini bubble” which was quite out of keeping with what we should expect to be seeing.

Worse, if this seeming Scaninavian bubble were to pop, it could well send what has up to now been among the strongest regional rebounds on the whole European continent straight into a nosedive. In particular the Finnish problem interests me, house prices are rising steadily, and with them construction activity, even as the economy in general remains severely depressed following one of the sharpest output falls to be found in the Eurozone. Continue reading →

One of the worrying things about the handling of the current European crisis is how many of those responsible for taking the decisions seem to view the Eurozone in a way which is every bit as rigid, timeless and dogmatic as the thinking of those old school scholastics whom Galileo, in his time, found himself battling against. Rather than facilitating a dialogue, and a free and open discussion, the guardians of fortress euro seem to want to keep the doors slammed tight shut, just in case any strange and unwanted ideas should inadvertantly slip in without them noticing. Continue reading →

According to Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero speaking in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday the European sovereign debt crisis is over. “I believe that the debt crisis affecting Spain, and the euro zone in general, has passed,” Mr. Zapatero said.

This is excellent news, but it comes with just one proviso, and that is that despite all such reassurances most financial market participants seem to be far from convinced that he is right. True Spain recently raised nearly €4bn in a successful government bond sale, with some observers suggesting the sale constituted but one more sign that what is still the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy had finally broken free from the group of “peripheral” European economies who have severe economic problems and whose debt is viewed by investors as especially risky. Continue reading →

The modern world moves at a breathtaking pace, even when most of us find ourselves on holiday. No sooner do we receive, read and start to digest one set of economic data than we find ourselves pushed to think about what the next set will look like. The clearest recent illustration of this undoubted reality is to be found in peculiar twist of events which meant that just as the news reached us that the German economy had expanded at a record rate in the second quarter, at almost the very same moment Federal Reserve officials meeting in Washington decided to significantly downgrade their economic outlook for the United States, saying the “pace of recovery in output and employment had slowed in recent months” and was likely to be “more modest” than anticipated in the near term. But this followed a month of May when it seemed Europe’s economies were on the brink of disaster, while over in the United States some sort of recovery was on the cards. Continue reading →

Well, having just posted a lengthy study of the German economy on this blog, I started to lazily browse my way around today’s economic news headlines, and Lo & Behold, what did I find over at the FT, a contrarian voice. That of Wolfgang Munchau. In his comment column he berates the Euro Area for its lack of product market and labour market mobility – in the sense that there are large differentials in both price and wage levels, yet few seems motivated to either shop or work around in the search for a better deal. Few seem motivated to follow Germany’s earlier example of a real devaluation, with consequences which are, unfortuantely, only too predictable.

Taken together, this means the intra-eurozone imbalances will not only persist, but probably increase. This will make the economic adjustment for Spain, Portugal or Greece even more difficult than it already is. Those persistent imbalances, much more than the build-up of debt, are my deep cause of concern about the long-term health of the eurozone.

But from a German perspective, this strategy boosts growth in the short term. It is, of course, a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy. The improvement in Germany’s economic growth is driven not by productivity gains but by real devaluation.

So while I expect the German economy to perform better than the eurozone average, it is important to keep some perspective and not draw false inferences from the 9 per cent annualised growth rate during the second quarter. If you look at the period since the beginning of the financial crisis, Germany’s economic performance has been dismal. If you compare levels of gross domestic product between Germany and the US since the crisis, you find the US significantly outperformed Germany during that period. That situation may still be reversed if the US were to go into a double-dip recession. But the best judgment we can make now is that of Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, in her recent interview in the Financial Times: Germany is recovering faster this year because it contracted faster last year, when GDP fell by 5 per cent. So far, this looks like classic dead-cat bounce.

Given its export-dependence, the performance of the German economy will ultimately depend on the global economy. As the US is heading for another downturn, it is hard to see how Germany can maintain its recent rates of growth. To do so would require a sudden increase in domestic demand. But I cannot see where that would come from.