Debt Crisis: Bundesbank cuts German growth forecast - live

09.25 Austria has followed neighbouring Germany and slashed its growth forecast. The Austrian central bank revised its growth forecast for 2013 to 0.5pc from earlier predictions of 1.7pc, citing weak exports and subdued investments. This year's growth forecast was revised down to 0.4pc compared with a previous estimate of 0.9pc.

08.51 Back to Italy, and the threat that the government will dissolve after the technocrat administration led by Mario Monti lost support from Silvio Berlusconi's PDL party. The OECD has urged Italy to maintain stability, or risk undoing any economic reforms put in place by Mr Monti's government. Speaking in an interview published in an Italian newspaper today, the OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan said:

The Italian economy is certainly weak, the timeframe for emerging from recession is getting longer. Given there is this fragility, the main parties should give clear signals that the agenda of the Monti government will continue.

08.27 Our columnist Jeremy Warner has pointed out the Autumn Statement was shocking not for the measures it unveiled but for what it revealed about the state of our public finances.

This week?s dollop of bad news very much falls into the memorable category, but not for the measures it contained, which in the round were broadly neutral and will therefore have very little macro-economic impact. They also do nothing to further the Government?s goal of balanced budgets.

Rather, it was for the daunting size of the challenge the accompanying documents laid bare. The austerity we have seen to date is just the beginning, we are now told; there are still lorry loads of the stuff to come, with some exceptionally tough choices to be made both by this Government and its successor.

In this sense, it was somehow vaguely reminiscent of the Alistair Darling Budget in which the full horror of the damage done to the public finances by the banking crisis and Great Recession finally became apparent. The latest outpouring of data and forecasts is equally shocking in its implications.

Read his whole piece here.

08.13 Here's a look at how the euro performed against the US dollar yesterday- the start of the steep plummet co-incides with a comment from Mario Draghi saying the ECB would be "operationally ready" to cut the overnight deposit rate to below zero for the first time. As Hans Redeker, currency chief at Morgan Stanley said:

A negative deposit rate is the mother of all sell signals for a currency. You only do it if your purpose is to drive down the exchange rate to help exports. We know from Japan?s experience that you lose control of monetary policy if you go that route. We don?t think it will happen because the cost is too high, so we expect the euro to rebound.

_{Bloomberg's euro-dollar currency chart}

07.44 Germany's central bank has cut the country's 2013 growth forecast to 0.4pc, from 1.6pc predicted in June. The Bundesbank revised this year's growth downwards from 1pc to 0.7pc, with the economy expected to contract in the third quarter and stagnate in the fourth. Its statement said:

Economic prospects have clouded in Germany as a result of a severe adjustment recession in parts of the euro region and the slowdown of the global economy.

06.00 Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the eurozone debt crisis.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568796/s/265b569d/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cfinance0Cdebt0Ecrisis0Elive0C9727920A0CAutumn0EStatement0E20A120Elive0Bhtml/story01.htm

African painted dogs What Time Do Polls Open Krysten Ritter cnn barack obama lakers v for vendetta