Economic conditions in Europe continue to be highly troubling. Virtually every country, including Germany, has seen slowing growth, even as the overall European economy has yet to recover from the Great Recession of 2008-09. Indeed, looking at the single index of economic growth, Europe’s growth rate is significantly worse than its recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many economists are beginning to worry that it will take at least a decade for Europe to recover fully from the current economic slowdown.
The Washington Post has an interesting article on how the rest of the world views the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Appropriately, most outside observers emphasize the issue of race and its unresolved status in American society. Not surprisingly, few of the articles use the US protests as a mirror of their own societies which are also plagued by racism (the Russian criticism is particularly hypocritical). To my surprise, however, few of the articles focus on the economic issues underlying the problems in Ferguson, nor do they link the protests in Ferguson to other protests that are going on the world today. There are many threads that unite the Ferguson protests to the Arab Spring and the protests in Europe against austerity. But there is one big, incontrovertible difference between the US and the rest of the world:
About 130 Russian trucks carrying humanitarian assistance have entered Ukrainian territory. The trucks entered without Red Cross approval and the Obama Administration threatened Russia with additional sanctions. The move places the Ukrainian government with a difficult choice: it can do nothing and allow the Russians to fortify the separatists, or it can use force to evict the Russian trucks giving Russia a pretext for war. This chess match is moving toward some sort of end game.
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