Europe's troubles are bubbling beneath the surface

ON EUROPE

The fundamental problems that caused Europe's crisis are still not resolved, but investors buy companies, not economies, and the region is cheap argues Rowan Dartington's Tim Cockerill.

The state of the eurozone is no longer filling the pages of newspapers or taking up hours of television as it was 12 months ago, so investors could be forgiven for thinking that all is well again. Yet while the region is much calmer on the surface, the fundamental problems have not changed since the financial crisis began - too much debt and too little growth. The European approach to their woes has been austerity, although the use of this term has now been dropped from the political vocabulary, as the sight of rioting Greeks was not good for selling the idea to a wider Europe.  But t...