Europe's economic slump deeper than expected...

Demonstrators in Rome on Friday. Tens of thousands of factory workers, public employees and jobless people marched through the streets to protest the government's handling of the economic crisis.

PARIS: Europe sank even deeper into recession than the United States in the closing months of last year, according to figures published Friday, as finance ministers of leading industrialized nations gathered in one of the worst-affected countries, Italy, for discussions on the crisis.

In the fourth quarter, the economy of the countries sharing the euro declined by 1.5 percent, according to the European Union's statistics office. That is even worse than the 1 percent decline in the U.S. economy during that period, compared with the previous quarter.

"Today's data wipes out any illusion that the euro zone is getting off lightly in this global downturn," said Jörg Radeke, an economist at the Center for Economics and Business Research in London.

Until recently, some economists had thought that Europe might suffer less from the recession, which started in the United States before spreading to most of the rest of the world. While some European economies, including Britain, Ireland and Spain, have seen U.S.-style plunges in home prices, housing markets have held up better elsewhere in Europe. Consumers have also cut back less on their spending in Europe than in the United States.

But instead, European industry has been walloped as businesses around the world, and particularly in the United States, cut back on new orders to bring down their inventories. That has hit euro-zone countries hard, particularly Germany, which relies on exports to fuel economic growth.

Germany was not the only European economy to do worse than analysts had expected in the period. In France, output declined by 1.2 percent, while Italy contracted by 1.8 percent.

The data "confirm that the recession in the region is deepening at an alarming rate," said Jennifer McKeown, an economist at Capital Economics in London.

The report from Germany on Friday showed a sharp rise in inventories - indicating more bad news for the first quarter, economists said.
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WORLD TO STAY IN SLUMP

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Group of Seven finance chiefs vowed to tackle a "severe" economic downturn that will persist for most of 2009 without spelling out new steps to do so.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 14 February 2009 - 10:02 PM.

As I said before, this is a world wide crisis. Dollar bears can only go so far. Everyone will be monetizing their debt, not just the US. The other factor no one is accounting for, however, is political stability. With all economic things being equal, the other major factor to account for in relative currency valuation is political stability. As I see it, US is still the most stable country in the world. Russia, Europe, China, etc are not. You think just because we're gonna print a crapload of $ that the US will go belly up? Watch riots in europe, china, russia. Watch wars between China and Russia. We are safe because we only have to deal with Canada and Mexico. We are self sufficient when you don't account for money. We have large fertile farmlands with enough food production to feed our population and a large military that is still unrivaled. You can say whatever about downfall of US etc etc. Everyone will go through the same crap as we did, but they have the additional burden in that they are not stable.

So long as the printing presses are not broken and there is enough paper around, money will keep flowing from all the central banks. TARP + STIMULUS I + STIMULUS II + Mother of TARP.....you get the idea.

LOL: all those protestors are now passed out with bellies full of wine and pasta.