All eyes were fixed Wednesday on Spain, as the country’s borrowing costs showed no signs of slowing their climb amid nervousness about the health of the banking sector and the possibility of the crisis spreading to other euro countries.
Europe’s economic stagnation and continuing financial turmoil in the euro zone have weighed on confidence, the European Commission said Wednesday. The commission’s indicator of business sentiment in the 17-nation euro zone fell in May to 90.6 from April’s revised 92.9. The decline, it said, “was driven by falling confidence in all business sectors, especially in industry and retail trade.”
Jonathan Loynes, an economist in London with Capital Economics, noted that the sentiment data showed “acute weakness across the peripheral economies,” but that the Dutch, French and Germans were also less optimistic. He described it as “overall, an unambiguously weak picture which only looks likely to get worse as the debt crisis continues,” and predicted that euro zone gross domestic product would decline by 1 percent this year, with 2013 “likely to be much worse.”
Read it all. Also, if you want a single picture to keep an eye on, it is the Spanish German 10 year spread which you may see there (yes, that is correct, it is at all all time high).
