Word: europeanate
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What a difference a week makes. With their coordinated response to the international banking crisis, European governments - followed by the U.S. - appear to have calmed a worldwide market panic and eased fears of a devastating series of bank collapses. Investors from Tokyo to Tunis immediately sent stock prices shooting up again after a week of historic losses. But it's still far too early to celebrate. The measures need to prove their effectiveness by unfreezing lending. And there's still the huge challenge - no less urgent than fixing the banking system - of preventing an economic slump...
...result: economists across Europe are writing off 2009 as a year to forget, and some expect the weakness will continue into 2010 and beyond. Consumption will likely be sluggish and business investment soft. In European countries where the real estate market had overheated, including the U.K., Ireland and Spain, house prices are expected to continue tumbling. As the rest of the world also slows, exports will be hit - particularly bad news for Germany, which as recently as the first quarter of this year had served as the motor of Europe, thanks to its surging sales of machinery and other capital...
...struggling Europe is bad news for the rest of the world, since more than one-third of all foreign direct investment into countries such as China and Brazil comes from the 27-nation European Union. The E.U. with its 490 million population has also been an ever larger consumer of goods and services from Asia; last year it imported about $1 trillion worth from emerging markets alone, and China is its biggest supplier. With the U.S. economy also expected to drop off, it'll be up to Asia to generate its own growth for a while...
...home, a significant impact of the European slowdown is likely to be a rise in unemployment. The number of jobless in the E.U. dropped sharply between 2005 and 2007 and then flattened out at 25-year lows. But the latest statistics from France, Ireland, the U.K. and some other countries show that the unemployment rate is starting to pick up again. The IMF, which has slashed its growth forecast for the euro-zone countries for 2009 to a negligible 0.2%, predicts that the percentage of jobless in those 15 countries will jump above 8%. Worst hit will be Spain, where...
...rates are low, unlike in the early 1990s, and the price of oil has dropped from its peak earlier this summer as demand slows from the cooling global economy. That's good news for consumers everywhere. But the signs of economic woe still add up to a minefield that European governments, central banks and other policymakers will have to navigate carefully. Here are some of the mines that lie in wait for them...