The gap is staggering. In 2024, the US economy grew by 2.8%, a figure more than three times higher than that recorded in the Eurozone (0.7%) and the European Union (0.8%), according to official data published on both sides of the Atlantic on Thursday, January 30. It's a gap confirming the Old Continent's stalling over several years, and described forcefully by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, in a September 2024 report.

In the US, most indicators are in the green. In 2024, the unemployment rate remained very low, at 4.1%, compared with 6.3% in the eurozone. Inflation there was still at 2.9% in December 2024, a figure still deemed too far from the Federal Reserve's (Fed) 2% target. This was one of the reasons why its president, Jerome Powell, decided to leave rates unchanged at 4.2% on Wednesday, after cutting them by one point at the end of 2024. The fact remains: the Fed and the US have managed to do what most observers considered almost impossible: curb inflation, which had soared to 9.1% in June 2022, without causing unemployment to rise excessively, or going into recession. Economists call this a soft landing, a feat achieved previously only in the mid-1990s.

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