Skip to main content
Sunday, November 15, 2026Nov 15
Subscribe
All Sections
Search
More

For Europe’s vast unemployed, hopes remain dim

Portuguese Jose Nunes Pereira, 31, carries food dishes to customers in his new restaurant, in Lisbon, Friday, Sept. 5, 2014. Nunes Pereira, who opened a restaurant last month in a Lisbon business district, dismissed the European Central Bank rate cut as "totally irrelevant". The cut "won't trickle down to families. It's a measure aimed at big companies, not small ones like mine," he said. For the struggling Spanish shopkeeper or the Portuguese restaurant owner, the European Central Bank’s latest economic stimulus plans won’t likely provide much relief anytime soon. If ever. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
Portuguese Jose Nunes Pereira, 31, carries food dishes to customers in his new restaurant, in Lisbon, Friday, Sept. 5, 2014. Nunes Pereira, who opened a restaurant last month in a Lisbon business district, dismissed the European Central Bank rate cut as "totally irrelevant". The cut "won't trickle down to families. It's a measure aimed at big companies, not small ones like mine," he said. For the struggling Spanish shopkeeper or the Portuguese restaurant owner, the European Central Bank’s latest economic stimulus plans won’t likely provide much relief anytime soon. If ever. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

By Associated Press 5 min read

WASHINGTON (AP) – For the struggling Spanish shopkeeper or the Portuguese restaurant owner, the European Central Bank’s latest economic stimulus plans won’t likely provide much relief anytime soon.

If ever.

Confronting a stalled economy and painful unemployment across Europe, the ECB is doing what it can. It surprised economists and investors Thursday by cutting its benchmark interest rate to a record-low 0.05 percent. And it announced plans to pump money into the financial system by buying bonds backed by assets such as auto and credit-card loans.

But Europe faces a crushing array of problems – from burdensome regulations to growth-killing budget policies – that analysts say remain beyond the ECB’s powers to fix.

“Monetary policy cannot carry the entire burden of reviving growth in the absence of essential broad-ranging structural reforms,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University.