In Europe no less than in the United States it was the crisis of 2008, not the later eurozone debacle, that marked the decisive break in investment, consumption and unemployment. From the second half of 2007, as banks great and small in Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland, and the Benelux began to acknowledge the scale of their losses, lending collapsed. The banking sector felt the pressure first because it was most dependent on the daily churn of vast volumes of credit. But soon the crunch extended to nonfinancial corporations and households too. In the eurozone, after running at between 10
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