Europe's stock markets fell sharply in early trading on Friday with banks and businesses rapidly dropping in value the day’s selling binge in Asia.
Fresh recession warnings and mounting debt in the Eurozone have seen red creep across the board, while Europe is picking up where the US left off on Thursday – which is down.A deadly cocktail of ingredients is poisoning investors at the moment. Not only is America releasing toxic figures on unemployment, housing and so on, yesterday was also the worst day in two and a half years for one of the world’s biggest stockmarkets, the FTSE in London, which took a battering on fears of a new global recession.In a warning sign, top bank Morgan Stanley, slashed its forecast for growth for the world economy.Asia has not been left unscathed with its markets also down, lending credence to the saying, “when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold“, and that is particularly true for export-driven Asian countries like China and India, which rely on the West to buy their products – computers, toys and so on. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world is suffering at the moment because of the deplorable state of the American economy.This week’s summit of EU leaders has, in truth, raised more questions than it answered.Opinion polls show that the people of Europe do not favor their plans for a unified financial government for the EU, which raises real questions about how democratic the European leaders really are.Also, the plan does not address the real problem, which is that many EU-member countries have too much debt and their economies are uncompetitive.
US markets still losing ground
US stocks markets opened lower, following a slight plunge in Asian and European markets on Friday. After a comparatively calm few days in the markets, newly-released economic data has made grim reading for US traders over the last week.Domestic manufacturing fell to its lowest point since 2009, while the housing market is in a slump, and unemployment is spiraling.The recent forecasts coming from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase was not positive. All three banks released reports in the past day slashing their expectations for US and global growth. Morgan Stanley believes that the global economy is hovering close to recession, and JPMorgan Chase declared that the risk of recession has been elevated. Such news will likely cause investors to lose even more confidence and trust in the world’s markets.