II. What's driving the world toward a new slump?

[TexasTowelie]

The recent swings in world financial markets and the growing international effects of an economic slowdown in China have raised fears in the U.S. that the economic recovery could be on its last legs--even before working people felt like they had escaped the last crisis. And what will come next? In part one of a three-part series, Lee Sustar looked at the causes and consequences of the Great Recession and the impact of China's slowdown. This second installment answers questions about how the crisis reshaped the European economy--and why it's proving so hard to overcome there and around the world.

HOW DOES the turmoil in financial markets and the slowdown in China described in the first part of this series relate to Europe's crisis over Greece, austerity and the euro currency?

THE DOMINANT European Union (EU) countries are trying to extricate themselves from a crisis of their own making, even as they cope with the rise of China and other developing countries.

The resulting conflicts and confrontations have exposed an aggressive new Germany that is determined to subordinate the rest of the EU to its own agenda and keep itself at the center of a huge economic entity that can meet the China challenge and assert itself in relation to the U.S., at least in economic terms.

Since its creation in 1999, the euro--the common currency used by 18 European countries--was a great deal for Germany. Since the euro was valued significantly below what Germany's old currency, the deutschmark, would have been, it effectively lowered the cost of German exports.

Read more: http://socialistworker.org/2015/09/29/driving-the-world-toward-a-new-slump