The new eurozone panic

Investors are panicking over the latest episode in the eurozone crisis. But as John Stepek explains, Europe is still a buy.

Markets finally have something else to panic about other than the plunging oil price. Greece might be ready to walk out on Europe again.

The threat of another eurozone eruption (particularly now that deflation has taken hold region-wide prices fell by 0.2% year-on-year in December) has sent the euro to a nine-year low against the dollar. Even the apparently unstoppable US S&P 500 market had a grim start to the year, experiencing its longest losing streak since the end of 2013.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.