Retail association ‘Confesercenti’.
– Crisis is closing ‘134 retail outlets’ a day in Italy (ANSA.it, June 19, 2013):
Confesercenti describes situation as a ‘massacre’
Rome, June 19 – Each day 134 shops, restaurants and bars close in recession-hit Italy, retail association Confesercenti said on Wednesday. Confesercenti, which represents small and medium-sized businesses in the retail and tourism sectors, said 224,000 enterprises had closed their shutters since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008.
“It’s a massacre,” said Confesercenti President Marco Venturi.
“Every day five green grocers, four butchers, 42 clothes shops, 43 restaurants and 40 bars and catering business close down”.
This is history repeating itself. In 1919, after the Great War, the western economy (including the US) went into a severe depression. 1919-1921 were two brutal years. The powers that be started rebuilding with stock market and real estate bubbles. Finally, in late 1928, early 1929, weakness in the European bubbles started affecting the entire globe. The Crash of 1929 happened when Europe hit the bricks, and the US followed.
Here, in 2000-2002, we had the dot com crash. Many of us lost a lot of money. Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, all of these huge corporations collapsed thanks to Enron Accounting methods. It was a mess.
Nothing was done to repair any of the bad accounting, clean up any of the corruption, just kept going.
So, we did the same thing again. Real Estate bubble kept the economy going until 2008. They have pumped the stock market, but there isn’t any money left there…..85% of all transactions are High Frequency, when a few people controlling huge funds (at least on paper) buy and sell massive amounts of securities in less time than it takes to blink one’s eye.
There is a movement afloat in Europe to privatize all student loans going back 15 years, double their rates, so they can package and trade them on the world markets. That is probably going on behind closed doors here. The market is leveraged 1000:1. Unless they get an infusion of real money, it won’t hold much longer.
We are in deep trouble, and there are no bubbles left to inflate. Unless nations can start earning again, not just pushing paper, we are finished.
italy is screwed
Basta ‘La Casta’: No End in Sight to Italy’s Economic Decline
The truth is that Italy, despite being the third-largest economy in the euro zone after Germany and France, finds itself in dire straits, having been in decline for years. Its GDP has dropped by 7 percent since 2007.
The last few years, says Gianni Toniolo, an economics professor in Rome, represent “the worst crisis in (the country’s) history,” even more devastating that the period between 1929 and 1934.
The government has reduced its growth expectations for the current year to minus 1.3 percent. The Bank of Italy, the country’s central bank, is even more pessimistic, forecasting economic contraction of 1.9 percent.
But economic growth only tells part of the story. More than half a million industrial jobs have been lost since 2007, and 15 percent of the country’s industrial capacity is gone, says Luca Paolazzi, head of research for Confindustria, Italy’s leading industry association.
Some sectors have lost even more capacity, with the automobile industry having declined by 40 percent. According to Paolazzi, Italy is experiencing an “unprecedented process of deindustrialization.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-crisis-in-italy-continues-to-worsen-a-912716.html
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