Revised Deflation Grave Summary

Original version:


Summary of “Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese’ deflation grave”

 Ambros Evans-Pritchard, in the Telegraph of October 23, 2013 explains why a policy error in Europe could soon cause a deflation crisis.

Recently inflation in the euro zone has dropped to 0.9 pc with no signs of turning into an upwards trend anytime soon. That is putting the euro zone on the edge of a deflation crisis. According to Evans-Pritchard, a deflation would become absolutely disastrous once a country’s debt surpasses 300pc of GDP. For Countries like Italy or Spain deflation would mean a “runaway debt” situation.

Evans-Pritchard believes the ECB should be doing everything to ensure the inflation does not fall below 2pc. Instead, due to a strong bias towards Germany, the ECB is sitting on its hands, waiting for the global economy to grow again and lift the European economy up. Ironically Germany, fundamentally voting against inflation, is on the edge of deflation itself. According to Evans-Pritchard that offers the perfect opportunity for the “Club Med allies” to unify and use their authority and persuade the ECB to change its policy. If nothing changes Evans-Pritchard fears Europe will follow into Japans footsteps. All it needs is one nasty surprise and Europe will have its very own deflation crisis.

Revised version:
Summary of “Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese’ deflation grave”

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in the Telegraph of October 23, 2013 explains why a policy error in Europe could soon cause a deflation crisis.

Recently inflation in the euro zone has dropped to 0.9 pc with no signs of turning into an upwards trend anytime soon. According to Evans-Pritchard, deflation would becomes absolutely disastrous once a country’s debt surpasses 300pc of GDP. For countries like Italy or Spain deflation would result in “runaway debt”.

Evans-Pritchard believes the ECB should be doing everything to ensure inflation does not fall below 2pc. Instead, due to a strong bias towards Germany, the ECB is sitting on its hands, waiting for the global economy to grow again and lift the European economy up. Ironically Germany, fundamentally voting against inflation, is on the edge of deflation itself. According to Evans-Pritchard that offers the perfect opportunity for the “Club Med allies” to unify and use their authority and persuade the ECB to change its policy. If nothing changes Evans-Pritchard fears Europe will follow into Japans’ footsteps. Only one surprise could act as a catalyst and Europe will have its very own deflation crisis.

Writing an Academic Paper...

Writing an academic paper, I noticed that 1000 words are far less than they sound.

Writing an academic paper, I realized how difficult it is to focus on one topic and not get to far from it while writing.

Writing an academic paper, I found out how crucial it is to always write down where you've read what.

Writing an academic paper, I discovered the world wide web to be my enemy, with all it's unreliable sources which would contain sooooo much unreliable information.

This is just a short list of problems I so far had to face so far. However, most difficult for me has been to figure out what exactly my topic is about, and how to structure the paper, so I would not be tempted to run riot. My biggest problem is not that I am not interested in my topic, but the exact opposite: I am way too interested. Reading more and more about it just makes me want to extend my paper endlessly. It is really hard for me to figure out what information to I have to include in my academic paper and what is dispensable. Yet, I have not found the perfect way to get rid of this obstacle. What I did do, is writing a concept like we have to do for our first Proseminar Paper. I already have the headings for all the parts in my paper and i have assigned my sources to these headings. Now I am carefully reading through the sources and writing down important information with all the details about where I found them. The next step, and hopefully the easiest one, will be to sum all this information into nice paragraphs. The last step will be to put all the nice paragraphs together in order to have them form a well structured and perfectly written academic paper.

Received Pronunciation

Having looked at several websites recommended on our pronunciation practice page, I realized that this is actually going to be a lot of fun. I always had a thing for different English accents and finally this predilection of mine is going to pay off, hopefully. So far I collect different accents like other people stamps or coins or those weird cards. With that I do not mean that I can actually pronounce and speak in different accents. No, that would be a really arrogant. What I have in mind are TV shows like “Downtown Abbey” (northern English accent maybe Yorkshire) “Hart of Dixie” (broad southern American English), listening to Maggie Smith with her fabulous Scottish accent in Harry Potter or listening to Dublin radio shows. I just love accents.

 Regarding my future pronunciation I would have to say that I definitely prefer the received pronunciation in the British English. I think it will be easier for me to do because I actually lived in Winchester, England for four months. Another reason will be all my former English teachers who encouraged us to speak British English. Having looked at the pronunciation exercises I realize it is going to be a lot of work, but I think it is worth the effort. One video that in particular was very interesting for me is where they compare the British and the American English. Her you can see that even though many people think there are not that many words that are pronounced differently it starts with easy things like garage. Still the girls did it in a funny way, and I am going to have lots of fun with all the exercises. 

I actually found this video on youtube, maybe it could help some of you too:

 

Deflation crisis in Europe

Summary:      Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese’ deflation grave

Ambrose Evans- Pritchard writes in his article, published in The Telegraph on October 23th 2013, about Europe’s inflation crisis and how policy errors increase debt. He describes Europe as the world’s next epicenter of policy errors. Consequently, deflation becomes lethal for most of Western Europe. Many countries, for example France, Italy, Spain etc. have seen price falls and are now standing with one foot in deflation. The Eurozone is close to the danger of exploding dept ratios. Using the example of Italy there are two options to get out of this dilemma - return to the lira or increase the primary budget to 6.3% to stabilize debt, which is unrealistic. Over the past two years, Italy’s debt has jumped from 121% to 132% - this ‘denominator effect’ happens when debt rise faster than the nominal GDP. It is not only the public debt, but also the private debt which causes problems. Companies run down their liquid assets to stay in business. The author proposes a possible break out of this impasse with Club Med forcing Germany to accept inflation. He says once you let deflation lodge in your system, it takes heaven and earth to get out of it.

My comments:

I like the topic sentence. However, there is no space between names that are joined with a hyphen.
The second sentence more or less repeats what you have said already, so it is kind of redundant. I would lose it.
The ext mistake that caught my eye is this part: "increase the primary budget to 6.3% to stabilize debt". I do not think, "to 6.3%" is unclear. First of all, it would be "by 6.3%". Secondly, 6.3% of what? 

debt rises

The last couple of sentences in your paragraph do not link very well. I can see your bullet points.

Again I do like the last sentence. Even though, I am not sure whether or not the register is right.