The euro area’s flagging economy: The shadow of recession
BAD news about the euro area now streams from all directions. European finance ministers flunked hard decisions on combating the debt crisis at a meeting in the Polish city of Wroclaw on September 16th and 17th and instead floated the irrelevant idea of a tax on financial transactions. Italy’s credit rating was downgraded this week by Standard & Poor’s (S&P).
In Athens, the Greek government and the troika of international institutions overseeing its austerity programme have been sparring over what else Greece needs to do to get its next, €8 billion ($11 billion) tranche of bail-out funds. Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister, complained that Greece was being “blackmailed and humiliated”, although it has little choice but to knuckle down: on September 21st, it announced measures to raise taxes, speed up public-sector lay-offs and cut some pensions. A decisio