“With the euro now trading around 1.56 against the dollar, the size of its annual output (at market value) has exceeded that of the United States,” US investment bank Goldman Sachs estimated last week.
“Brief as the development may prove to be, European policy makers will no doubt derive some pride” from the event.
Well, there, Goldman Sachs is wrong. That development is likely to last a while; in fact the Eurozone is likely to expand its lead in size over the American economy:
the economy of 320 million people — which churns out 15 percent of global gross domestic product — has slowed but shown a degree of resiliency to the US slump that few would have counted on just a few years ago.
Historically thrifty German consumers helped the national retail sector gain 2.7 percent in January, with the trend continuing in February according to the HDE sector association. …
Bank of America economist Holger Schmieding said that “apart from the housing market correction in Spain and Ireland, the eurozone has no major domestic problem,” while Jennifer McKeown at Capital Economics noted: “The eurozone hasn’t built up the same kinds of imbalances that we’ve seen in the US and the UK, too.”
That last line also bears careful notice.
If the continental members of the European Union take note, they may decide, if Great Britain continues to dither about dropping the pound and adopting the euro, that they don’t wan’t the UK to be part of the eurozone.
Gordon Brown, you’re officially on notice to shit or get off the europot.
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