Well don’t come to this blog looking for good economic news at the moment, becuase quite frankly, at least as far as Europe is concerned, there isn’t any. Today we learn that Latvia’s economy is in freefall. The economy contracted 10.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the sharpest fall in the entire [...]

Exports from Germany fell back again in December after suffering a record fall in November. This only confirms the general impression that the German recession is steadily deepening. Sales abroad, adjusted for working days and seasonal changes, were 3.7 percent from November, (when they dropped 10.8 percent), and by 7.7% year on year, according to [...]

The French economy, which is Europe’s third largest, will slip into its first recession in 16 years in the first quarter of 2009 according to the Bank of France this morning. French gross domestic product will shrink 0.6 percent in the three months through March, following a 1.1 percent contraction in the final quarter 2008. [...]

Well it seems Guilio Tremonti was paying brinksmanship with someone last Friday, since according to Bloomberg this morning:
UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank, said institutional investors will buy its convertible bonds after its biggest investor, Fondazione CariVerona, said it wouldn’t subscribe to its share of the securities. Mediobanca SpA, UniCredit’s adviser on the transaction, “has fully [...]

Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti is a strange and controversial figure.The peculiar phrase in the title to this post in fact came out of the very mouth of Tremonti himself, though they were addressed to an astounded, if now world famous, US economist, Nouriel Roubini, in front of an equally amazed and bemused Davos audience. [...]

Well it’s pretty clear to me at least that there is now one, and only one, major and outsanding topic towering head and shoulders above all those other pressing and important problems those of us following the EU economies currently find lying in our macro-policy in-trays: the issue of wage cuts. Not since the [...]

This post is partly about Russia, partly about how to follow the present economic crisis on a day to day basis and partly methodological.
So Which Are The Worst Affected Countries In The Present Crisis?
Obviously the simple answer to this question is “all of them”, and in particular all those countries who are members of the [...]

The German economy is about to suffer its deepest recession since World War II according to economics Minister Michael Glos speaking in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag due to be published tomorrow (Sunday). Glos said growth in Europe’s largest economy is now expected to drop by as much as 2.5 [...]

OK, so now here’s the chart you really need to see (below). The JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI hit 33.2 in December, a series record. More to the point you can get a comparison between what is happening now and the 2001 “recession lite” with only a swift glance, and, of course, the 2009 long recession [...]

And lands in China.

Well China isn’t quite in Great Depression mode yet, but manufacturing activity - which forms the core of the Chinese economy and accounts for 43% of all activity - is already very close to a technical recession, and phew, it wasn’t very long ago that the Chinese economy was registering double [...]