In a Spin: Europe’s Stock Markets

Abstract

Historians will look back on the 1980s as a decade of predominantly Right Wing governments, favouring supply side economics and producing much-needed stability. A decade too of surprisingly high world growth, of controlled wage and raw material costs, of socially unacceptable, but industrially advantageous unemployment levels, and of startling corporate profitability. And they will see a decade where stock market and stock market players attained unnatural ‘highs’. It will be a decade with which favourable comparisons will be drawn because overall it may rightly be described as a decade of success, certainly by the standards of the 1970s. Indeed, since 1982 we have enjoyed a period of ‘slow, sustainable, controllable, non-inflationary growth’. A period also which witnessed some — but not enough — worldwide economic policy coordination and steady hard and soft commodity prices, including gold. However, all this is changing.