Italian Industrial Output Falls Sharply

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Well, this was really what I had been waiting for, not that I welcome the news, obviously, but simply that as far as I am concerned it is far from unexpected. People have been ‘writing off’ Italy’s grave structural problems far too easily IMHO:

Industrial production in Italy declined 0.9 percent month-on-month in October for an annual drop of 2.7 percent, national statistics agency ISTAT reported today.

The fall was driven by a 3.6 percent year-on-year drop in intermediate goods production and a 3.1 percent reduction in consumer goods output.

OTOH, the German Investor Confidence Index published by the ZEW Center for European Economic Research spiked dramtically upwards today showing how strong growth in China and the US and the falling euro is boosting expectations in Germany’s export sector. This is, I think, pretty much what we can expect to see from Germany in the months and years ahead: strong export growth when the global economy is booming, and weak domestic demand keeping overall growth tepid.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".