Growth: Eurozone and Months

growth: Germany's first period of falling output since the first three months of 2015, and its worst performance since early 2013, helped drag eurozone growth from 0.6% to 0.2% in the three months ending in September, highlighting the vulnerability of the eurozone to a disorderly Brexit, according to The Guardian. The contraction followed growth of of 0.5% in the second quarter, and financial markets expect a bounce-back in Germany in the final three months of 2018 as bottlenecks in car plants during the summer come to an end. Tough emission tests affecting the country's strategically important automotive industry, lower consumer spending, and weaker exports triggered by rising global protectionism resulted in the economy shrinking by 0.2% in the third quarter of 2018. The consultancy firm Oxford Economics said the 8% fall in car production in the third quarter rippled through the motor industry's supply chains and cut growth by 0.5 percentage points in the third quarter. It added that there were mixed signals for domestic demand, with German households spending less but firms investing more in machinery, equipment and construction. Germany has posted average quarterly growth of 0.5% in recent years, and had that trend continued, eurozone GDP in the third quarter would have been 0.4% rather than 0.2%. Destatis, Germany's statistics office, said the country's foreign trade position had deteriorated, with exports falling and imports rising. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.