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Italy: Flirting with technical recession
Industrial production data, just published by Istat, showed that the Italian economy shared the same difficulties as Germany and France in November. Although a public holiday at the start of the month might have contributed to the worsening picture, we believe the impact is probably only minor. The seasonally-adjusted measure contracted by 1.6% month-on-month (from a downwardly revised -0.1% MoM in October). The working day-adjusted YoY reading, better suited to monitor the trend, was also sharply down to -2.6% (from +1% in October), the lowest reading since October 2014. Production contracted by 2-4% MoM in ... (full story)