Here's two images culled from the web. with my comments underneath.
Debt to GDP is a fair measure of the situation and clearly there are some EU countries with problems of overspending. Italy looks almost as bad as Greece, and worse than Portugal or Ireland! But we have to consider who owns the debt, as far as I know a fair amount of Italian debt is owned by the Italian banks. Whereas the Greek debt is widely owned by other country's banks, notably Germany and France.
Never the less the EU rules are that countries should keep within 60% and many of them clearly don't. There's a lot of sorting out to do.
And here are the debtors compared to their 2010 GDP numbers. Italy and Greece are the only ones well over 100%. But Greece is very much smaller than the others, ranking 8th in the list. Everyone worries about Spain but they are really not so bad. They have high unemployment but that should be curable. Germany is disappointing as the largest economy, it is both over the EU limit and not doing very much to help others balance their account.
It's probably haircut time!
Thursday, 14 July 2011
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