For the longest time, Europe’s moribund growth profile meant the ECB’s biggest worry was deflation — economic “Japanification,” so to speak. Nothing’s changed structurally about the European economy in the 2020s, which is to say there’s no reason, or no reason that I’m aware of, for anyone to expect lively growth.

Notwithstanding the spate of below-target headline CPI prints out of some high-profile economies, including Europe, I’d argue the global macro environment, to say nothing of the geostrategic environment and domestic political realities across the developed world, still looks inflationary.

Put those considerations together, and what do you get? Stagflation, or at least the risk of it, in Europe.

With that in mind, it was somewhat refreshing on Wednesday to see the European economy post solid growth for Q3, even if it proves fleeting. The 0.4% expansion from the prior quarter was twice the pace economists expected.

As the figure shows, Q3 marked the third consecutive quarterly expansion after a long-running malaise.

Does this mean the ECB was wrong to rush into a third rate cut this month? In a word: No. In two: Probably not. In two more: Who knows. This is all — every, single bit of it including and especially the effort to derive accurate growth aggregates for nearly two-dozen disparate economies  — guess work.

But as noted here at the outset, those who inexplicably condemned themselves to life as a European technocrat are best served to err on the side of expecting slower growth. So, I won’t argue with the disposition to cut rates.

Germany managed to stay out of recession in Q3, sort of. The engine of European growth (or Europe’s “sick man,” depending on how you want to look at it) managed to show a 0.2% expansion, but Q2 was revised to show a much larger contraction — 0.3% versus 0.1% as originally reported.

Germany’s mired in what some analysts have (aptly) described as forever-“slowcession.” The simple figure above underscores the point. It’s fair to suggest the country’s staring down an almost existential economic crisis, and I don’t see an obvious way out of it. (Neither, apparently, does VW.)

Anyway, I realize that European GDP releases belong in the thesaurus as antonyms for “exciting,” but given the debate around the ECB’s October cut and disagreement over the likely size of December’s assumed move, the figures were worth a quick mention on Wednesday, particularly as they appeared at odds with lackluster PMIs.

Maybe, ING’s Bert Colijn remarked, the ECB’s concerns around “an imminent recession” are overdone. But he cautioned market participants against reading too much into Wednesday’s figures. “First of all, notoriously volatile Irish GDP growth [which is] significantly influenced by multinational accounting activity contributed positively to today’s reading,” he wrote. “Besides that, the French GDP growth figure of 0.4% is likely to have been boosted by the Olympics this summer.”

It’s enitrely possible, Colijn went on, that this is a “dead cat bounce.”