Euro zone manufacturing slows as Italy, Spain slide

[Strengthandhonour]

Euro zone manufacturing slows as Italy, Spain slide

Updates with economist's comment, market reaction) By Nigel Davies
LONDON, May 2 (Reuters) - Euro zone manufacturing activity fell to its slowest pace in nearly three years in April as Italy and Spain slipped further into contraction, a survey showed on Friday.
The RBS/NTC Purchasing Managers Index for the manufacturing sector fell to 50.7 in April, just below the 50.8 flash reading and economists' forecasts.
The index, now only just above the 50.0 mark that divides growth from contraction, provides growing evidence of a cooling euro zone economy, with indications that worse is to come as new orders shrank for the first time since May 2005.
An expensive euro , which flirted with the $1.60 mark in April, and a broad slowdown in global growth hit factories over the month. The euro has since fallen back to around $1.55.
However, price pressures remained high and will support the European Central Bank's case for leaving rates on hold at 4.0 percent when it meets next week.
Germany saw a sharp slowdown in the pace of activity in April, but managed along with France to stay above the 50.0 mark.
In contrast manufacturing in Italy and Spain sank further with their indices continuing to show contraction for the second and fifth months running respectively. The Spanish PMI hit a six-year low in April.
The euro and financial markets were unfazed by the data.
"Spain and Italy are underperforming and that will need to be carefully monitored in coming months to see if there is going be contagion to the core of the euro area, which is resisting better," said Guillaume Menuet at Merrill Lynch.
However, he said the fall in the euro and inflation at the end of April could well help the manufacturing sector going forward.
"It might be slightly premature to expect more sizeable downticks in May and June."
Factory output cooled further in April. The output index slipped to 51.9 from 52.1 in March, its lowest since August 2005 and just below the 52.2 flash estimate.
Manufacturers also saw a plunge in orders taken. The new orders index fell to 48.6 from 50.9, while the export orders index fell to 49.7 from 51.1, just below the 49.8 flash reading. Both were at their lowest since May 2005. But signs of slower growth to come contrasted with elevated price pressures as oil, energy and food prices all surged higher.
The output prices index rose to 56.4 from 55.5 the previous month, just up on the 56.3 flash and suggesting firms found it slightly easier to pass on high costs.
Survey manager NTC said price pressures could well increase in coming months given there had been no real let-up in a surge in oil prices. U.S. crude oil rose close to the $120 a barrel mark in April, up from around $100 at the start of the month. (Reporting by Nigel Davies; Editing by Gerrard Raven)

source: Feed Article | Business |

[Kernunnos]

My hot dog man confirmed this very empirically, all the fine restaurants around his little shop are going bankrupt for lack of clients.

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by Kernunnos

My hot dog man confirmed this very empirically, all the fine restaurants around his little shop are going bankrupt for lack of clients.

The petit-bourgeois class having difficulties with pursuing their empty quasi-hedonistic life-style. I can't care less.

[Kernunnos]

Originally Posted by Marulus

The petit-bourgeois class having difficulties with pursuing their empty quasi-hedonistic life-style. I can't care less.

Marulus, it means that we are in a deep crisis.

When people have working businesses, they go out and dine.

It is not a moral question.

BTW, what is wrong with enjoying life with friends and loved ones?

Should a nationalist live like a monk?

What matter is to have an healthy kind of fun, enjoying the company of serious people and having intelligent fun.

My kind intelligent fun includes good traditional food, carefully cooked, and some good wine.

Not surely esoteric recipes or, on the other tip of the scale, multicultural hamburgers in a mcdonald ... just good wine and our traditinal recipes, even yours when I was in Istria and went to eat in makeshift restaurants along the road, where food was genuine and meat also was free from the chemicals of "progress".

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by Kernunnos

Marulus, it means that we are in a deep crisis.
When people have working businesses, they go out and dine.
It is not a moral question.
BTW, what is wrong with enjoying life with friends and loved ones?
Should a nationalist live like a monk?
What matter is to have an healthy kind of fun, enjoying the company of serious people and having intelligent fun.
My kind intelligent fun includes good traditional food, carefully cooked, and some good wine.
Not surely esoteric recipes or, on the other tip of the scale, multicultural hamburgers in a mcdonald ... just good wine and our traditinal recipes, even yours when I was in Istria and went to eat in makeshift restaurants along the road, where food was genuine and meat also was free from the chemicals of "progress".

OK, Kernunnos, my comment was maybe too rash. I do not think that all people, not even all nationalists, should live like monks, although I respect individual decisions of becoming monks (but they are and always will be - a minority - luckily).

My all too rash comment was born out of my general sort-of bad disposition against certain petit-bourgeois mentality, which I see as the pillar of the current disgusting system. I am not speaking here of people running small businesses, whom I respect (actually my vision of a healthy society/community/nation is the one where many small family businesses abound and not great multinational corporations), but of a particular mindset which infects large strata of the population, even those parasites on the state pay-roll. There is a myth of the so-called "middle class", whereof the entire society has become part (at least in theory), having all its stereotypical habits, ways of thinking, following fashions of the moment etc, the average member of which is the perfect obedient slave of the System. I was referring to that and not to small entrepreneurs enjoying their meal in some restaurant, with money they honestly earned with their work.

Really, nothing wrong with enjoying good food in a good restaurant.

[NatVox]

Originally Posted by Kernunnos

My hot dog man confirmed this very empirically, all the fine restaurants around his little shop are going bankrupt for lack of clients.

The signs are the same here, with the difference that it is highly unlikely that Zapatero's government will be able to do anything minimize the effects. Expect the crisis to move to levels of depression in Spain: There has never been a number as high of Spaniards with a mortgage, and interest rates are only expected to rise. Add to it a semi-floating immigrant population of about 5 million, which in Spain is of a fairly new arrival and which is not integrated in the society.