Europe "Growing", Barely...

That gain, equivalent to an annual rate of 2.2 percent, brought the eurozone's gross domestic product for the period -- the total value of goods and services produced -- to slightly above the previous peak reached in the early months of 2008, before the crisis emerged and Europe's core economy descended into a pair of crippling recessions.

...

Yet as milestones go, Europe's return to precrisis levels of economic activity came with so many qualifiers that any celebration seemed premature, at best, and at worst like a mockery for the tens of millions of ordinary Europeans who have far from recovered. New unemployment data on Friday showed that the eurozone jobless rate, while edging down slightly, remained above 10 percent -- more than twice the level in the United States.

...

But clouding the eurozone growth data was another new figure on Friday, indicating that consumer prices in the currency union were down 0.2 percent in April. Low inflation, or even periodic falling prices in the eurozone, has been a persistent problem, a sign of economic stagnation that continues to resist efforts by the European Central Bank to raise inflation, spending and borrowing to healthier levels.

Many economists now discuss Europe's prospects with the grim vernacular long used to describe Japan. There, a real estate bubble in the 1980s gave way to a calamitous bust that left banks reeling. Decades of half-measures aimed at finessing the economy to better days kept the ship of state afloat but left it in the doldrums.