The European Connection

Welcome back for a second semester at TEC!

In the last months, and despite Obama’s hopeful inauguration parties last week, the news in Europe and around the world are anything but hopeful. Just yesterday, UK economic performance data marked the end of a particularly dismal week in financial markets. The message seems clear enough: there will be no swift recovery in Europe and in the UK devaluation is painfully correcting past excesses – it’s like the bitter British 70s are back. There are some, however, who do not complain. And perhaps that is precisely what Britain needs right now to revive its struggling economy.

And yet, the return to growth seems farther and farther away with each day the stock markets are open. But is the increased monetary flexibility in Britain, when compared to the ECB’s corset on the eurozone, a good or a bad thing? The present crisis will become a case study, one way or another.