Video

When will crisis end?

Publishing date
13 May 2009
Authors
Zsolt Darvas

Question : "Hello my name is Irina. I'm from Romania and I've been living here in Spain for five years. I'm unemployed, like other Spanish people and like other immigrants here, and I'd like to ask the European Community when this crisis will be off? Because we don't have money, we don't have a job and we want some solutions. So please, if you can answer my question I'll be very thankful to you."

Answer: "My name is Zsolt Darvas. I'm an economist and I work for Bruegel, which is a think-tank in Brussels.

The question is when the crisis will be over. It's very difficult to predict when the crisis will be over, because this is a global crisis and affects all countries in the world, and this is the deepest crisis since the Great Depression of the 30's, in the last century. There are some signals that indicate that the fall in output has slowed down or even bottomed out. It is also indicated (by some indicators of the OCDE). But it also should be emphazised that there are a lot of country-specific factors also, for example in Spain. Spain had a very huge construction, housing and credit boom in the past years, and economic history suggests that credit booms end with a bust, and that Spain would have been in trouble even without the current crisis."

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