SUMMARY OF Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese’ deflation grave
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in The Telegraph of October 23, 2013 analyses the slippery slope of the EMU’s policy errors. (1)
The author stated that the EMU is facing a serious risk of lethal deflation as debt of many western European countries is over 300pc of their GDP. Additionally, inflation deteriorates the debt crisis. Albeit the ECB targeted an inflation of 2pc, which would improve the situation, the status quo is at 0.9pc and lower advancing debt growth. Given these circumstances, increasing sovereign and private debt is the custom for EMU members, especially for Italy and Spain. (2)
At the example of Italy, the author stated the outcomes of such errors. The EMU, dictating drastic austerity measures, causes an increase in national dept with no hope of monetary stimuli in Italy. As a result of these actions, populist parties are on the rise and youth unemployment is alarmingly high. (3)
Evans-Pritchard proposed a solution, where the Club Med and their allies should force the ECB to facilitate the so desperately needed reflation, instead of waiting for global growth to retrieve Europe’s economic strength. (4)
The conclusion Evans-Pritchard draws is that the EMU needs to take action if it does not want to be interred like Japan. (5)
200 WORDS, NOT INCLUDING TITLE
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My comment on the summary
- Good introductory sentence. Mentioned everything – author, publisher, date, what's it about. Really cool that he/she used "slippery slope". We learnt that expression last year and I haven't used it since then. I think it works pretty good in that context.
- I would write "Western European countries". He/She used "deteriorate", a very formal and strong word, which works perfect here. Personally, to me "targeted" sounds a bit strange, but you could simply change it to "Albeit the target of the ECB was ..." Oh, and please look up the word "albeit" – you used it wrong and it shouldn't be at the beginning of a sentence. Comma missing after 2pc. I'm not very happy with "lower advancing debt growth" – "increasing" would be a better choice for "advancing", but it still sounds a bit strange to me. Not sure if "sovereign debt" exists. Be careful with "custom" it has different meanings and here I would rather write "is the case for EMU members" (I hope that's what you meant)
- "At the example of Italy"?? Spelling mistake: "dept" instead of "debt"
- Good use of formal vocab, but "so" is not the right register. ("desperately needed reflation" is strong enough, making "so" obsolete)
- Good concluding sentence but... Well, what happened to Japan? I mean, we dealt with that text (Europe already has one foot in 'Japanese' deflation grave) and we know what happened but he/she mentioned that in the concluding sentence of his/her summary – it's new information that was never mentioned in the summary before.
All in all, the summary by this anonymous author was good. He/She used some very high register words, which is nice, but then I found some structures that he/she was a bit insecure with. There are also some mistakes in spelling and formulation that could have been avoided, by having the summary proofread by someone.
