Eurozone

All seems calm, but the present situation in Europe is worse than it has been during the great depression of the1930s.

"Just like the 1930s, Europe is stuck with a fixed exchange system that doesn't let them print, spend, or devalue their way out of a crisis. But, unlike then, Europe might never give it up. It's a fidelity to failure that even the gold bloc couldn't have imagined. And that leaves the ECB as Europe's only hope—which means they're probably doomed.

Now, to be fair, the Draghi-led ECB has done about as much as it can given its legal and political constraints. But you don't grade unemployment on a curve. And those constraints aren't going to go away, not enough anyway, to avoid a lost decade or two. Instead, the ECB will probably keep doing the bare minimum: some half-hearted quantitative easing that will stop as soon as Germany starts to grow faster.

They have made a desert, and called it the eurozone."

Read the whole article at : http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/20/worse-than-the-1930s-europes-recession-is-really-a-depression/.

And there is no end in sight ! Paul Krugman agrees : "Whatever the explanation, we are now, as O’Brien says, looking at one of the great catastrophes of economic history."

See : http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/the-euro-catastrophe/?