New eurozone crisis: Germany has tried to redo it in its own image.

The euro zone has just been through the last global economic crisis. Does he have what it takes to survive the next?

At first glance, the question seems alarmist. Labor markets remain robust. Wage settlements are growing at their fastest pace since 2013, and easy years of money from the European Central Bank have allowed banks to mitigate mountains of bad debt and allow credit to flow where it is needed. needed.

But the risks facing the region are always daunting.

The most obvious of these is the British Brexit, which could see the implosion of a market that absorbed 12.1% of euro area exports last year. (China took only 8.6%, according to Berenberg Bank badysts.)

Germany, the engine room of the euro area, has awakened belatedly to the threat, but the federation of German industry now says that a scenario "no d & # 39; agreement ", in which the UK would leave the EU on April 12 without any transitional provision, would take a half percent highlight the German economic growth this year. Clemens Fuest, one of the "Five Sages" of the German government, said Monday that the Brexit "could be the straw that breaks the camel" and tipped Germany into recession. Eric Schweitzer, president of the Chamber of Commerce and Commerce, notes that about 750,000 jobs in Germany depend directly on exports to the UK.

This would have repercussions elsewhere in a difficult period: the French manufacturing sector has been in contraction since the beginning of the year and Italy since October.

The next big threat is the escalation of the trade war between the United States and China, where an increase in import tariffs for one or both countries would affect all world trade, including cars that German companies currently export from their US plants to China.

Of course, Brexit and the trade war could end smoothly. But both are more frightened by the mere fact that they escape the control of the Europeans themselves.

Draghi tried to convince the markets that the ECB still had some work to do to cope with the crisis, but the market did not buy it. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes / Getty Images)

The fact that the Eurozone is so vulnerable to these external forces is largely due to the wrenching structural change that Germany and its allies, mainly from northern Europe, have imposed on Europe. monetary union during its last crisis. Until 2008, the currency bloc had a globally balanced current account with the rest of the world, even though it masked huge trade imbalances in the area. But the austerity policies imposed on Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus have negated the demand for imports and reshaped the euro zone in the image of Germany, making more reliance on exports than on domestic consumption to generate growth. After repeated efforts by Beijing to increase domestic consumption, China's imports of goods and services are now roughly equal to its exports, while it has a surplus of more than 10% of GDP. By contrast, the current account surplus of more than $ 400 billion in the euro area is now the largest of any major world economy, with an estimated 2.9 percent of GDP this year.

This leaves much of the continent's well-being in the hands of foreign consumers and foreign central banks.

The natural response to a slowdown of foreign origin would be to use fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate domestic demand. In France, President Emmanuel Macron tried to do this by buying back the protesters of the yellow vest, who took to the streets regularly for months to protest the limited income and generally get rid of the ruling clbad. However, the German government has recently put forward plans for four zero budget deficits for four years and minimal increases in public investment – even if negative returns on German debt mean that investors would actually pay the privilege of modernizing their infrastructure.

At the same time, the European Commission is doing everything in its power to prevent Italy, the third largest economy in the region, from further easing its fiscal policy by trying to escape a low-growth growth loop. Italy, Markit, said that the manufacturing sector had contracted at its fastest pace in five years in Italy during the second half of 2018, in recession in the second half of 2018.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, warned this week that Italy's public debt will reach between 144% and 156% of GDP by 2030, a level well above that of Greece when it entered crisis in 2010.

None of these factors is new, but at least in the past, the euro area has been able to rely on an effective central bank which, in the words of its president Mario Draghi, has done "all that is necessary" to maintain the cap. the road. But the ECB faces its limits in stimulating the economy. The key interest rate is likely to be -0.4%, after the abandonment of provisional plans to exit the negative interest rate policy of the crisis period last month. On the other hand, the US Federal Reserve will have the luxury of cutting rates by at least 2.5% by the end of the current tightening cycle.

In a speech last week, Draghi tried to convince the markets that the ECB still had enough tips to get by on the deal. But for the second time in a month, the markets reacted to its reinsurance with a mbadive sale.

When Draghi pulls out at the end of October, the safest pair of hands in the area will be gone. If Brexit and the trade war with China are not settled by then, his successor will have a daunting challenge.