A change in mentality?

Over the last week a serious change in attitude towards ailing countries within the EU has occurred. Leading with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the political scene in Europe has witnessed a 180 degrees turn. The change was so radical and impressive that Der Spiegel has published a full article on this. This could mean one of three things: 

1. The South has made real progress over the last month (hmm or week maybe?).

2. Merkel has understood that her policies and stance are making both her as well as Germans in general extremely unpopular in Europe (and elections are coming up in a year).

3. She has accepted that trying to push through many things very rapidly is not such a great policy after all.

Whatever the reason may be (Spiegel states that it's No2) the fact is that leaders now appear to be more united than ever before. Even statements of the "Greece should leave the euro/Union" kind are treated coldly by EU officials now. Still, as progress for unification in the political level appears to be improved the economy still fails to recover. Italy, just like Spain and Greece, has seen unemployment rates soar over the last months. While Mario Monti is doing his best to improve the overall economy, unemployment of youths under 25 has reached 40%. And with recession here to stay in Italy (forecasts expect GDP to contract by 2% this year) the situation does not seem to improve. 

European leaders fail to understand that people cannot live on GDP. After an EU-wide summit on unemployment nothing seems to have changed: the employed have not (cannot?) find anything to do about the jobless. I have proposed my set of ideas over reducing unemployment here, and while the list I have presented is not exhausting nothing has been done yet. Just as I have predicted, the EU will face a recession over the next few months. New evidence indicate that the recession will be far worse than we expected. The Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for the Eurozone predicts that the output will shrink by 0.5-0.6% over the current quarter instead of the initial 0.2% prediction. 

The worst part of these forecasts is that the EU's safest economy, the one where people actually paid to invest their money, Germany, is bound to move to the red. The OECD predicts that although Germany has grown by 0.5% and 0.3% in the first two quarters, in the following two an annualized contraction of 0.5% and 0.8% is expected. Only France may be able to remain more-or-less unscathed with output falling this quarter and rising on the next.

In addition to all these, Mario Draghi has announced a program allowing unlimited purchases of sovereign bonds in the secondary market, in order to keep interest rates at sustainable levels. The only opposition to this program is Bundesbank head Jens Weidmann who believes that the program is too close to state financing through the money press. He may be right up to a point, however, I do believe that the program is much ado over nothing, The problem with what Draghi has proposed is that the ECB will only assist countries that appeal for help to the euro bailout fund and submit to the required austerity conditions. What he also meant is that the ECB would only be able to do this for nations which are not considered as junk by the 3 rating agencies (Moody's, Fitch, S&P), i.e. Greece and Cyprus cannot be assisted.

Thus this leaves only two countries: Italy and Spain. However, the announcement failed to mention the amount which would be available to fund this action. Given the size of the Italian and the Spanish economy, it would have to be enormous. Yet, we are still unaware of the size and extent of the intervention and it would be nice to know some more details about it instead of the general idea.

In the meanwhile, what journalists have not yet proposed is that another reason of Merkel's newly appeared empathy towards the crisis-ridden countries maybe be that she is preparing to identify herself with the rest of the ailing nations if OECD forecasts are true. We will just have to wait until the official data is published to find out.