While the EU statistics office Eurostat said on Tuesday GDP in the eurozone rose 0.6% quarter-on-quarter in the three months to September and 2.5% year-on-year, the EC revised yesterday its growth forecast for the region to 2.2%, markedly higher for this and next year. Therefore, this Commission’s expectation in 2017 is well justified, based on published data from Eurostat.
Italy will choose their next government in 2018. Italy is subject to the same four issues present in many Eurozone member states, but with greater intensity: low growth (with productivity gains gone AWOL before the Global Financial Crisis), high public debt, a weak banking sector and political fragility. Improvements on all four fronts have characterized 2017.
Euro area confidence is booming, according to sentiment indicators. To BoAML analysts, “this remained curious, because the continued improvement does not quite match activity data that signals strong, but non-accelerating growth into year-end”.
According to Philippe Waechter, chief economist at Natixis AM there are two reasons in the UK economy to explain BoE last rate hike: a low productivity and a surge of inflation. In fact, the UK has had a productivity profile weaker than every other large developed countries except Italy since 2011.
Iberdrola, Enel and EDP, along with other European energy groups, have sent a letter to the European Commission and the European Parliament calling for more ambitious objectives with respect to renewable energies in the EU.
The BoE hiked on Thursday interest rates for the first time in more than 10 years by 25 bp to 0.5%. Given that UK growth continues at its lower potential pace with GDP forecasts at around 1.6%-1.7% between 2017-20, it seems that only one additional hike next year is likely. The country has been the 4th weakest economy in the OECD so far this year.
Nick Ottens via Atlantic Sentinel | How can Democrats win back working-class voters who have switched to the right? The obvious solution is to become more populist. However, we have seen social democrats try this in Europe and it didn’t work.
Nick Malkoutzis via Macropolis | Alexis Tsipras’s recent visit to the USA was something of a curate’s egg, ranging between high diplomacy and acute embarrassment. It would be wrong, though, to dismiss its implications.
Against a backdrop of unstoppable digitalisation, one of the objectives for the banks at the moment is to find a balance between their physical branches and this new digital approximation which clients want.
Spain has major access to the funds mobilised by the Juncker Plan. Many companies, like Gestamp and El Corte Inglés, are already benefitting with projects worth some 15 billion euros.