If I haven’t got the wrong end of the stick, Italy plans is to create a parallel currency to the euro, guaranteed by the Italian government, but which I don’t know who will control. A Bank of Italy? The government would issue these BOT, endorse them with the BI, which would give it the money to be shared out amongst the unpaid creditors. It seems a lot like Helicopter Money.
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.
Yiannis Mouzakis via Macropolis | Last Friday’s release of the second quarter Greek GDP figures by ELSTAT confirmed that the economy has recorded two consecutive quarters of growth. The last time Greece started a year with two quarters of growth was in 2006.
The problem in Spain’s economy: it’s that productivity is hardly apparent in the breakdown of GDP between the amount of work (number of hours worked) and the residue, which is productivity.
The latest batch of economic growth numbers corroborate a picture which we started to see last year, namely that the extent of the Eurozone recovery is widening. Germany is no longer the sole growth driver. Countries like Spain are catching up.
The US economy has entered its ninth year of growth and the recovery could last over 10 years, clocking up a new record. At this stage the doubt surrounding an atypical recovery is whether the best thing is for the Fed to maintain its monetary policy of the last few months and continue to gradually raise interest rates, despite the absence of inflationary pressures.
Suprising as it may be, 18 of the 19 members of the Eurozone saw an increase in GDP in Q1’17 with respect to Q4’16. Spain’s GDP improved by 0.6%; Italy managed to grow (0.2%); Germany and France clocked up a 0.4% rise. Only Greece remained in the red. The unemployment rate in the region has officially fallen to 9.6%…there is growth.
A survey by the Family Business Institute, which groups the big Spanish companies together, and the CIS’ economic confidence barometer show that people are confident about the outlook for the economy. But the political panorama is a different story. They are more wearied by the political tension and corruption than by the conditions of their daily lives.
The European Commission says that Spain continues to grow above the eurozone average and that this year GDP growth will exceed its highest pre-crisis level.