Germany Pulled Into EU Economic Whirpool

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Bad economic news has spread from troubled European Union nations to Germany. The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany for April showed:

In April 2013 the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany has fallen by 12.2 points and is now at a level of 36.3 points. Despite its decline, the indicator currently hovers at its third highest mark within the last 24 months. The current level has only been exceeded in the two preceding months.

“Basically, the surveyed financial market experts remain confident, but are less optimistic than they have been in the previous month. The decline in economic sentiment is consistent with the release of economic data that fell short of expectations”, says ZEW President Prof. Dr. Clemens Fuest. German exports into the Eurozone as well as the rest of the world have declined, for instance. The debt crisis in the Eurozone is still unresolved and causes uncertainty.

Many economists have said Germany cannot escape the implosion of most of the rest of the region. Its exports are too concentrated there. Demand for exports from the United States and Japan probably remain modest, based on economic measures in those two countries. That leaves China, where recent data shows that its GDP growth engine has cooled.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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