Following this week's ongoing battery of abysmal economic news out of Europe it will hardly come as a surprise that yet another indicator has been released and is pointing to a multi-year low in the deleveraging (elsewhere called incorrectly austere) continent, namely the Euro-area wide confidence index which just slide to the lowest leve since 2009, missing every single estimate and declining sequentially across the board.
- Economic confidence 92.8, est. 94.2 (prior 94.4)
- Industrial confidence -9.0, est. -7.0 (prior -7.2)
- Services confidence -2.4, est. -0.5% (prior -0.3)
- Final consumer -19.9 (initial -19.8)
- Business Climate Indicator -0.52, est -0.30 (prior -0.30)
Visually, courtesy of Reuters:
[10]
And with the UK, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Czech Republic, and Slovenia now in re-recession, and Spain a definitive shoo in next week, the kicker is that German GDP will almost certainly now report a second consecutive GDP print in a few days, thus pushing the entire European continent in a double dip.
Yet of everyone in Europe we feel the worst for Italy and its technocratic government, both of which are going to have a very difficult time explaining the confidence implied GDP print of worse than -2%.
[11]