France had a tiny contraction revised up to zero.

epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBL...2-14082012-BP-EN.PDF

Hollande's got austerity to do so they'll struggle.

Rounded up, not revised.

And rather likely to be revised down after a decent interval, it appears.

rounded down, I mean, sorry.

Finland not doing very well. You know how Tory bores complain about kids at school getting their marks, but not the marks of other kids because it's anti-competitive?

The opposite's true. Now I've seen we're beating Finland, I've decided we're doing OK. We can have a few more bank holidays.

Unsurprisingly, Europe still has no idea what it wants this unified bank regulator to do.

C'mon, how do you expect them to focus on that stuff when there hasn't been a major crisis for almost eight weeks or so?

Greece had a good debt auction yesterday.

Naysayers!

I'd be happy to buy some of their good debt. It's the other 97% I'm not so keen on...

Interesting FT article showing the changes in household income for each decile in the Eurozone countries till 2010.

ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/08/17/1123...-most-from-the-euro/




It's about domestic politics too, of course. Belgium seems to have hammered its poor. Austria has hammered everyone- presumably they were "internally devaluing" while things were relatively good.

Germany too didn't do very well out of the first 10 years. You can certainly see why they might be pissed off with the periphery where everyone did well. Finland on the other hand don't seem to have much to moan about.

Germany was paying for re-unification during that period. Adjust the figures for the massive transfer of wealth to the Ossis and that graph would look much different.

Seeing the poorest are disproportionately in the east, shouldn't the reunification transfers have raised some of the lower deciles?

Yes in Ostmark terms, but not necessarily in Euro terms.

I don't understand.

So on that graph, the poor are on the left and the rich on the right? You can clearly see the slow but steady destruction of the Dutch welfare state that started in 2002.

Same as Belgium. How do you hit them so hard, so quickly? Time limited benefits? Hollland already had some fairly substantial cuts in the late 80s, didn't they, when they were finding that public expenditure generally was too high after the windfall from natural gas had gone?

I thought "continental" welfare schemes weren't particularly generous anyway to the poorest. Aren't they generally more insurance based, so that people who earned good many get good money when they're unemployed?

Far lefty Francois Hollande backs Merkel v Greece. No slow down of austerity.

I can't see any logic there really. Surely Greece has been bad enough pour encourager les autres. Whatever else might be wrong with Greece now, it's patently reduced costs and become more competitive. A bit more demand would be useful, wouldn't it?

What has Greece become more competitive at?

Eh?

You said it had reduced costs and become more competitive. How is this greater competitiveness manifesting itself?

The usual stuff- lower wages, "liberalized" Labour market. It's done an "internal devaluation", as the euphemism has it.

Which brings all sorts of problems, of course, and Greece might or might not wish to carry on putting up with this nasty stuff. But it should be possible to get some economic activity going in the short term.