Friday 15 February 2019

The eurozone’s coming recession will confirm Brexiteers’ warnings

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From a good article by Allister Heath City Editor of the Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Between 1999, when the euro was launched, and the start of 2017, the latest period for which IMF data is available from Bloomberg, the eurozone’s GDP grew by 26 per cent, against the UK’s 44 per cent and 42 per cent in the United States. Italy is up by just 6.7 per cent and Greece by 1.3 per cent; both have suffered two wasted decades.
If being part of the single market and customs union mattered so much more than any other policy, the eurozone would have boomed. Yet it didn’t, and the voters know they have been sold a pup. If you want to see proper growth, you need to turn to the emerging world, to China (which has multiplied the size of its economy in extraordinary fashion), to India, to Singapore, to Israel (up 98 per cent).
.....The euro’s failure is even more disastrous. The huge boost to growth it was meant to generate by eliminating transaction costs and uncertainty never materialised. There was no free lunch, no spurt, no permanent upward shift in performance. The downsides have been cataclysmic – mad booms and busts in peripheral economies and the incompatibility between national social democracy and European fiscal policy exposed for all to see
These points are good ones. The single market, the euro and even the customs union have been remarkable disappointments and stages in Europe's downward trajectory from the continent that dominated economically, politically and culturally most of the Eastern hemisphere in the 1930s.


2 comments:

  1. AS you know the EU ideology is not about growth - its about protectionism - designed to protect themselves from other advancing nations by fixing trading costs of entry to the EU market - resulting in all the people in the EU forced to pay for over priced and often second rate EU produced tosh - it is a failed ideology, currently in its death throes - yet there is still a large chunk of the population retaining some form of blind belief in this failed social experiment - it is not a religion - wake up to the facts!

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  2. Want third-rate tosh? Buy Chinese.

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