Anonymus summary

Anonymus summary:

Ambrose Evans-Pitchard’s article in The Telegraph of the 23rd October 2013 analyses the

approaching European deflation in connection with debt.

At the beginning of the text, the author mentions that deflation had already occurred before.

Deflation can influence the economy of countries positively if they are not too heavily in debt.

This, however, is not the case in Europe: As many countries are overburdened with debts,

repaying it becomes more and more difficult if the inflation is too low. This problem does not

only affect national but also private debt.

It is argued that the ECB should try everything to maintain an inflation of at least 2% in order

to prevent from an economic disaster, but according to the author Europe seems to be

paralyzed. Italy, France and Spain should gang up on Germany and dictate a new policy,

which combats deflation and could therefore help restoring the damaged economies. Yet, they

fear that Germany might leave the EMU and leave it up to the rest to solve the debt problem.

Summing up, Europe is far away from a proper solution. It still seems to be in recession but

prefers to wait for an economic miracle instead of taking the initiative.

[201 words]

Dear anonymous writer,

What I like about your article is that you have a topic and a concluding sentence. I also like how you divided your summary into paragraphs; it makes it easier to read. However, your first sentence in the second paragraph makes no sense to me. Of course deflation happened before; it would be kind of naive to think it did not. Furthermore, in your third paragraph you are saying that Italy, France and Spain should gang up on Germany. Why Germany? Why not the UK for instance? I think that you should have explained it better. I do understand what you mean by that but someone who has not read the original article and is not familiar with the European economy might ask the same question. I know that we had a 200 words limit but I think you could have done a better job with explaining why Germany is to blame. Also, there would be no “rest to solve the problem“ if Germany leaves the EMU. Something like that would probably lead to the collapse of the EMU. From a perspective of someone who read the original article I think that your summary is fine although certain changes should be made. Please, do not take this personally. I am only doing my homework.

[217 words]

XOXO A.

"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything." Joseph Brodsky