Odds are now 50-50 that the entire Eurozone is or is about to be in a recession: Lucrezia Reichlin: The Threat of a Eurozone Recession: "My company, Now-Casting Economics, first detected a slowdown in the eurozone... started in the third quarter of 2017 and has affected all major eurozone economies, particularly Germany and Italy. This runs contrary to the widely held view of the eurozone as comprising a core of successful countries–especially Germany–and a debt-ridden, slow-growth periphery...
...German... quarter-on-quarter growth turned negative in the third quarter of 2018 and is likely to have been close to zero in the final three months of the year. Data releases from... surveys... timely but volatile, have more recently been confirmed by hard data.... The trend is similar in Italy, where the problem is magnified by the country’s lower potential growth rate.... If this flow of bad news is confirmed – and the global slowdown, political uncertainty, and trade disputes suggest that it will be–then the eurozone may fall into a new recession by the end of 2019, just over five years after the end of the last one...
#noted
