If a picture tells a thousand words, then can numbers dispel a thousand lies?
For months I have been saying that the global economy — in particular, Europe — is far, far healthier than the media has been reporting. And now a slew of numbers are starting to arrive that prove my point. The upshot tells you that European stock markets are the place to be as an investor in 2015.
I had this view confirmed  on European stock markets from an email I receive every morning from my European brokerage firm. This email simply catalogs various numerical data from various economies and stock markets around key parts of the world.
As I scanned the numbers, I quickly realized that, one after the other, they were proving the point I’ve been making all these months. They undermined all the Sturm und Drang that the media and the economists have been feeding us in what I can only assume is a quest to makes us think America is surging while the rest of the world is sinking. But it’s all been a whitewash.
Consider some plot points in this story:
- Commodity prices as tracked by Australia New Zealand Bank rose 1.9% for February, nearly double their pace from a year ago … a sign of inflation rather than the overhyped deflation we continually hear about in the U.S. and Europe.
- Building permits in Australia rose 7.9% in January, far in excess of the 2.8% decline from a year ago and well ahead of economists’ expectations of a 1.8% decline for the month.
- European retail sales rose 5.3% for January, making fools of the economists who predicted tepid growth of just 2.7%.
The data points keep going, though I won’t bore you with a bunch of numbers. I’ll just tell you that Swiss economic growth came in faster than expected; that unemployment in the euro zone was far better than expected, while euro zone growth has accelerated; that Canadian GDP was stronger than forecast; that Spain’s unemployment rate is falling and its economy is expanding faster than predicted; that the risk of deflation is now falling in Europe; that German labor unions are winning big pay raises, an indication of wage pressures, which only arise when economies are improving at a fundamental level; that the economy of Portugal, one of the much-maligned PIIGS nations during the European debt crisis, has returned to positive growth.
