More on the economic crisis in Europe, analyzing it's various systemic problems of lack of innovation and investment, aalong with its demographic aging problem and he inability to fund their pension, social welfare and military defense programs.

All this might lead many Amerikans to pat ourselves on the back with how forward thinking we are with all the money spent on R&D by behemoths like Google and Amazon, until you stop and think about what these innovations actually ARE .  It's all information based stuff combined with financialization, nothing really tangible is coming out of it. R&D on how to better spy on people and data mine their habits to sell things to them.  Besides, all this innovation isn't benefiting the Amerikan J6P, all the increases in productivity are going into increased profits for corporations and their stockholders and pay packages for upper level management.  The workers are losing ground just about as fast as their Eurotrash counterparts, and we never had the generous vacation time and cradle to grave social welfare programs they did.

The other reason not to get all happy about being the "winner" in the economic footrace with Europe is the same as feeling cheery about beating the Chinese, the 3rd major player with Europe and the FSoA in the global economic engine doesn't work.  Because it's a global economy, each of the players depends on the others to also be successful with what they are doing so everyone can afford to trade with everyone else.  They need to be able to buy what we sell and vica versa.  If any of the players descends into an economic depression, it drags the other ones down with it.  No man is an island, each depends on the other to succeed.

Europe's problems right now are so deep and have been brewing for so long it's hard to see how they can climb out of the hole they are in.  Which means that an economic crash is just about baked in the cake, along with a lot of political upheaval and radicalization, polarizing the political landscape.  In other words, it starts looking like the Europe of the 1930s, and we know how that played out.  Deja Vu all over again.

How long it will take for all these problems to crystallize into macroscopic outcomes like Depression and War is an open question.  Again if you take the 1930s as a roadmap, we're probably in 1930-31 now and ave 2-3 years before being fully in the grip of Depression, and 5-8 years before  Civil Wars like the Spanish one, followed by the continent spanning WWII.  Hard to say though because on the financial level things can happen so much quicker now.  The general direction is pretty clear though.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-economic-apocalypse/

Europe's economic apocalypse is now

RE