The Financial Decline In Europe Continues!

• The Financial Decline In Europe Continues! 
  by Tyler Durden, www.zerohedge.com
  Via Mark E. Grant, author of Out of the Box,
  As Industrial Production falls -0.6% in Europe and as the economy shrinks -0.2% there is once again a good reason to pause to consider the ramifications for this going forward. As part of the data release this morning Germany and France did somewhat better than expectations but it was fairly marginal while the rest of the EU-17 continues to be mired in difficulties. Overnight LCH increased the margin requirements for both Spain and Italy as the banks of Spain keep increasing their borrowings at the ECB which is now at an all-time record. More troubling perhaps is the recent release of data from Italy which showed that their sovereign debt had ballooned to $2.437 trillion and the trajectory is more than troublesome. In 2010 and 2011 Italy’s debt was expanding by $7.90 billion per month but in 2012 Italian debt has increased by $11.73 billion per month for a projected $141 billion by the end of this year. In fact the Italian economy is shrinking by about   -2.5% while their debt is growing by 5.8% which is the baseline for an unsustainable situation if these trends continue.
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  To make matters worse Italy’s Industrial Production is down -8.2% from a year ago and down  -1.4% in the last month. I think Italy must be reassessed in light of the recent data and I would project further downgrades for the country and an increase in their bond yields as people recognize the severity of their problems. To me it looks increasingly likely that both Spain and Italy will soon line up at the feeding trough which is going to strain Europe, in my opinion, past the limits of what France and Germany can bear and then all of the superlatives and all of the great hype are going to come face-to-face with a very tough reality I am afraid.
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  Learning from the Numbers
  When you sit back and take a hard look at the last two years you begin to learn a few things. If you just stick to the actual data and forget the rhetoric that surrounds it the picture becomes clearer. Each and every projection for Greece, Spain and Italy that has been forecast by the EU and the IMF has been wrong; dead wrong. This would be in overly optimistic to the point that anyone relying on these projections and investing on their basis would lose money as a result of believing in them. I submit then that it is a mistake going forward to accept their numbers as reliable and you should note this in your thinking.
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  read more!

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