Some officials in Brussels may argue that the outcome, all things
considered, is not that bad. The decline was smaller than expected and
the single currency’s big two economies — Germany and France — both grew
by 0.2 per cent. Austerity was bound to exact a price but the price is
proving bearable.
The serious unrest that swept across Europe on Wednesday provides one
counter to the glass-half-full way of looking at things. The fine print
of Thursday’s data offers a second reason to be less sanguine. The grim
prospects for the fourth quarter of 2012 and beyond are a third.
Clearly, parts of the
eurozone are suffering grievously from slow growth, frighteningly high unemployment and falling living standards. The fact that
eurozone
GDP still fell even when Germany and France were growing indicates that
activity was falling quite fast in some of the smaller economies.
The problems of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have been well
documented; the worry in yesterday’s numbers was that “core” countries
such as Austria and the Netherlands saw their economies shrink in the
third quarter. For Angela Merkel and François Hollande, the worrying
message is that the contagion is spreading.
What’s more, all the signs are that the downturn is intensifying in
the final three months of the year. Analysts think the fourth quarter
will see a decline of 0.5 per cent, with a strong chance that both
Germany and France will go backwards.
Nor are the prospects much brighter for next year. Greece has just
signed up to another batch of spending cuts, the Spanish economy is in
freefall and Germany will continue to struggle while world trade remains
weak. The first half of 2013 will be grim.
Britain is not in the
eurozone
but, as Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England noted on
Wednesday, events on the other side of the Channel are stifling
recovery.
The Bank of England’s view that the UK economy will contract in the
fourth quarter was supported by the unexpectedly poor figures for high
street sales in October.
In past years, consumers have tended to tighten their belts in
October and November before having a splurge just before Christmas, when
jittery retailers cut prices to shift stock, so it is premature at this
stage to assume that there will be falling output in the final three
months of 2012, let alone two consecutive quarters of negative GDP over
the winter that would constitute a triple-dip recession.
But the desperate state of the
eurozone economy makes a third leg to the UK slump a real possibility. You would not want to bet against it.
— The Guardian, London