Only fools and Europhiles

Every time one of his doomed money-making schemes collapsed in ignominy, a deluded Derek Trotter in the BBC’s marvellous Only Fools and Horses would insist that despite this latest setback, ‘this time next year we will be millionaires’. Few Brussels apparatchiks have ever ventured to Peckham, but they seem to have learnt a trick or two from David Jason’s character, as can be seen by their touching conviction that an economic renaissance in the eurozone is always just around the corner.

In the same way that the Trotters’ luck sometimes turned and profits briefly flowed in, only to be lost again in richly comic circumstances, the eurozone occasionally enjoys an uptick in growth by piggybacking on strong global trade. The good days never last, however, and there has been no real boom since the dotcom days at the turn of the decade. But that hasn’t stopped some of the City’s more naive economists becoming ludicrously overexcited by the latest batch of economic statistics.