The deep recession did not begin to ease until the second half of 2013. By that point unemployment in Greece and Spain had peaked at 26–27 percent. When it came, recovery was agonizingly slow and was overshadowed by the increasingly worrying news from the emerging markets. In 2014, with prices falling all around the world economy, the EU was stalked by the fear of deflation. Was the EU sliding toward the economic quicksand that had trapped Japan since the 1990s, with bad debts weighing on recovery and inadequate demand feeding on itself?
