Business Insider: Holy cow, the Italian economy is crumbling

According to Forexlive, Italian industrial orders in September (before things reached this new level of tension), fell 8.5 percent sequentially.

That's worse than the 6 percent sequential decline that analysts had expected, though even that would have been quite a tumble.

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It's pretty hard to imagine, at this point, that most of Europe isn't in recession.

Even Germany has seen a string of fairly ugly data over the past several weeks, pointing to a pretty rapid economic contraction.

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Of course, this is exactly what these economies don't need while dealing with this sovereign debt stuff, as this kind of economic collapse ensures missed government revenue and deficit targets, starting the whole spiral over again.

Joe Weisenthal is the deputy editor of Business Insider and writes Money Game. Read his bio here.

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