There’s more bad news. Friday’s figures showed activity in Euro Zone manufacturing slowed in June while 1 in 10 citizens remain unemployed. In fact, manufacturing has reached an eighteen-month low. Exports have already gone on vacation early. Budget cuts have left more citizens without a way to even pay for a summer trip to the French Riviera. Even manufacturing in Germany has slowed to the slowest rate of expansion in 17 months. Manufacturing in Pigdom — Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece — has contracted. They figure that if they try to come up with a new bailout plan for Greece, the markets will go crazy — they never go on vacation — and we will have another mess like 2008.
So let the ECB raise the interest rates 1/4 point. Probably no one will notice as all the lights dim and all the finance ministers and their minions disappear to a mountain cabin or a condo by the sea to while away the time until the next crisis, which surely is just around the corner.