Economic Outlook: Beware the euphoria | Economie

After so many pandemic regrets, let’s allow ourselves some rest. The Commission’s economic outlook for the summer is cheerful. They are recalculating growth across the EU upwards. Which is rare, since the eurozone is in a parallel line, while it is usual to be in the back.

To add relevance, curator Paolo Gentiloni recalls it as the “largest upward adjustment” of forecasts in a decade.

But one thing is comfort, which encourages, and the other is ecstasy, and even complacency, which numbs. Because along with the unusual data, some clouds loom. one is take off Hello V From the epidemic, surfing on an Indian breed imported from the UK. Brussels and several institutional alerts are seriously warning of its negative economic effects if excesses are not corrected.

Another is the lag with regard to higher speeds in the United States and China.

The most serious is that if the recovery of the prior level of GDP (2019) is achieved in the EU and the eurozone in the third quarter of 2021 (for Spain, in 2022), as the Commission expects, hawks They will take advantage of the occasion.

And it will intensify its fight to hastily return to the austerity rules of the Stability Pact, forgetting the laggards. more subtly than during the Great Recession, Wolfgang Schäuble (F, 2/6) calls for a return to the “normal financial condition” of the most indebted (forget the duties of those with excessive current account surpluses); While Lorenzo Bini Smaghi reminds him that 2019 has not yet been normal, the fallout from 2008/2011 lingers (F, 14/6).

And the same with hawks monetary. They will use the temporary rise in inflation (1.9% this year in the eurozone, according to the Commission; 2.5% in Spain, according to the Bank of Spain) to urge Frankfurt to withdraw stimulus.

They are already attacking negative interest rates as if they were positive from natural law: “They expropriate the property of savers and this is unconstitutional (!) because it goes against the fundamental right (!) to get a return on everyone’s properties”, this “ The European Central Bank has taken away of him,” exclaimed former German constitutional judge Paul Kirchhoff. A response to this economic folly is Professor Friedrich Heinemann, from communicate (5/7).

The committee’s most suggestive work is to remind it that by the end of 2022, although the pandemic’s economic level has recovered, it will be “1% lower” than the path projected at the time.

In the aftermath, Gentiloni explained: “Our goal is not to return to 2019 GDP levels.” This referred to the proposal of the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, and the Spanish Governor, Pablo Hernandez de Cos, to increase the ambition of the union’s economic policy, which we portrayed in Going back to 2019 is not enough (Country, 29/6). How do you put this bell on the cat?