The eurozone’s short-lived recovery is already losing steam as stimulus fades and deep problems resurface, raising fears of yet another false dawn and a potential deflation trap if there is any external shock over coming months.

Since the end of November, the euro has steadily risen against the dollar from a low of 1.05 to 1.14 today (5/11).  But the sugar rush is coming to an end.

Industrial output fell in 1.3% Germany and 0.3% in France in March as manufacturing stalled, confounding expectations for robust expansion. The relapse in a string of countries suggests that flash estimates of 0.6% GDP growth in the first quarter were too optimistic and may have to be cut.

“The recovery is not gaining any traction. I am really quite worried about another spasm of the debt crisis over the summer,” said Lars Christensen from Markets and Money Advisory.

The eurozone has been basking in a sweet spot over the last year, with stimulus from cheap oil, a weaker euro, ECB bond purchases, and an end to fiscal austerity, all coming together in a "perfect positive storm". “If that can’t produce growth, nothing will,” says Nouriel Roubini from New York University.

The Green religion is dying. You can see the evidence of this in the latest Gallup survey showing the number of Americans who identify as “Environmentalist” down to 42 percent (from 78 percent in 1991).  But even more telling, I think, are the glimmers of anti-Green skepticism we’re now starting to see in movieland and on TV.

See, for example, Kingsman (2014) which cast Samuel L Jackson as an insane Malthusian bent on wiping out most of the human race for the good of the planet; and also Utopia (2013), the genius, black as your hat thriller about a similar “the Earth has a cancer; the cancer is man” type conspiracy.

Now there’s a Nordic Noir TV series I strongly recommend you watch – just out on DVD – called Follow The Money.

The Guardian hated it – which is a recommendation in itself. But what’s even better is the reason why I suspect the Guardian hated it: it couldn’t quite get its head around the fact that the bad guys aren’t in Big Oil or the Military Industrial Complex or some faceless corporation. Instead, the baddies work for a renewable energy company with the caring, sharing name Energreen.

It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, sofas and beds.

If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not. I wanted to savor every sentence of this remarkable feast of prose.

The subtitle is: How Ideas, Not Capital or Investment Enriched the World. It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the “great enrichment” of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great book of our age.

The gist of her argument is that the Industrial Revolution (which was not a revolution, for it started extremely slowly and is still gathering pace) was not caused by an accumulation of capital, or the exploitation of colonies, or science, or government policy, or a change in institutions.

All these explanations are too small or arrive too late to explain the astonishing 2,900% increase in real incomes of westerners.

The cause was a change in values that allowed merchants to engage in trade without being despised and persecuted, “a bourgeois rhetorical tsunami around 1700 in the North Sea.”

Before — and in many places, since — “the sneer by the aristocrat, the damning by the priest, the envy by the peasant, all directed against trade and profit and the bourgeoisie, conventional in every literature since ancient times, has long sufficed to kill economic growth.”