Eurostat has produced the numbers for November industrial orders in the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The picture continues to appear that Europe is sliding into recession, though not at a breathtaking pace. In this particular case, the Eurozone has retrenched to the low level of September, erasing the slight improvement in October. Meanwhile the broader EU continued to follow the Eurozone down.
Here are the changes relative to 12 months ago (Nov for most cases, Oct for a few):
Eastern Europe is mostly recovering, as is Ireland. Greece and Portugal have had a terrible year. Spain Germany and Italy don't look great either.
Of course, the negative developments in the real economy are going to feed back into the financial crisis. In a slowdown, more businesses will fail than usual, and more households will lose income or become bankrupt. That in turn will increase the strain on bank balance sheets as they get left holding the resulting bad loans.
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Interesting to compare it with US manufacturing orders, also through November:
US manufacturing new orders through November
So far, all that talk about US decoupling seems to be holding up.
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