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7/20/13

Despite Negative Reports From Some US Based Financial Circles Europe's Economy better Off Longterm Than US

The British Guardian reports that there are special factors at work in the United States which make cities more vulnerable to swings in their economic fortunes than those in Europe, and special factors in Michigan and Detroit that left the once-mighty automobile center peculiarly open to decline.

The United States lets its cities sink or swim in a way inconceivable to Europeans. American cities fund their budgets from their own tax base, with only limited subventions from state or federal government. If that tax base shrinks, as it began to shrink in Detroit decades ago, they must borrow to maintain services and can dig themselves ultimately into a very deep debt pit.

British cities, by contrast, are constrained in what they can borrow and they receive support from central government on a basis which redistributes funding from richer to poorer communities. Some European countries, like Spain and Germany, are more like America.

Another difference is that the American middle class, and some businesses, have frequently been able to escape the tax demands of big cities by moving out to legally separate, lightly taxed satellite communities while continuing to earn their living in the urban core. In Europe such escapees often find themselves recaptured by boundary adjustments.

So European cities are better insulated against trouble than American ones. A city's misfortunes will usually be softened by funds from better-off regions, while in the United States such help is both less and comes later.

Local councils in Britain, for example, are warning more and more insistently that cuts in funding are moving beyond just impairing services to the point where they could completely undermine them.

In Detroit, gentrification nibbles at the edges of desolation. There are economic new starts, and optimists are looking for a tipping point into revival. Yet there is another tipping point, the one that opens up again that terrible landscape of burnt-out cars, shuttered shops and deserted roads. Detroit is not a precedent, but it is a warning.

The euro zone had done good work,says the IMF for instance in starting a banking union. And yes, the commitment by the European Central Bank (ECB) to intervene in bond markets had restored some order.

Investors are getting the message: Fund flows into European equities have risen for three consecutive weeks, the longest streak of inflows since January, Bank of America Merrill Lynch reported on Friday.

EU-Digest

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