OK I’m on a roll, so I’m going to stick my neck out. This slide in the Italian confidence index apparently surprised the ‘experts’. Well it shouldn’t have surprised Fistful readers who have been following what I have been saying. Clearly these confidence indexes are not the last word in sliced bread. But they do mean something, and Germany’s Ifo index just turned in another bad reading too.
Ever since Parmalat, I have been asking one simple question: will Italy ever grow again? Of course, the simple answer is possibly it will: never say never. But will it ever get back to vigorous growth: this I doubt. I am even half asking myself if we will see positive numbers in more than say 50% of the forthcoming quaters. Remember, if my demographic thesis has any predictive power it should be precisely here in Italy that the Titanic starts to take in water. Parmalat was simply the iceberg. Of course my thesis could always be wrong. Any takers?
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