To say that Europe is doomed is an understatament, so much so that every European politician, banker, bureaucrat, and bean-counter has, over the past 5 years, taken at least one opportunity to deny and thus validate the statement.
But while there is cornucopia of reasons which foretell the collapse of the artificial monetary and pseudo-political union, whether it is the relentless deterioration in European output:
[3]
or the collapse in private lending, something the ECB is supposedly trying to fix with its latest TLTRO/Private QE...
[4]
or the mountain of private debt created since the Great financial crisis.
[5]
Eclipsed only by the amount of public debt created in the same period...
[6]
... one thing is clear: Europe is finished, though not for any of the above reasons but for a far more simple one, a reason very well-known to the Japanese - there simply won't be any Europeans left.
[7]
In retrospect perhaps it is time for Wolfi Schauble to take a stab at draft 2 of his famous FT scribe: "Ignore the doomsayers: Europe is being fixed [8]," because, we are sad to report, the doomsayers are right: Europe is finished.
Source: Geneva Reports on the World Economy [9] [9]
