Europe's future? Not good.
Ordinarily during a boom, demand for products rises and businesses will then expand to increase their output so as to take advantage of the opportunity. But that doesn't really happen in Europe.
In most of Europe now, if a business hires a lot of people during a boom, they are at serious risk of being stuck with a huge workforce during a bust that they can't afford to pay and aren't permitted to lay off. It's theoretically possible to have mass layoffs but the procedure is slow and involved and can be halted by bureaucrats or employee lawsuits. So businesses which expand aggressively during boom times face a great risk of bankruptcy during the next downturn, whenever that might come. On the other hand, with taxes as high as they are most of the potential financial reward for that kind of growth is confiscated by the state. Companies which grow and hire and produce more revenue will pay a lot more taxes, but they won't actually make a lot more profit.
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The trap the European governments are in now is that their leaders have no way to maneuver or relieve the situation. It isn't politically possible to substantially reduce entitlements, so they're stuck with huge government outlays which only get worse when the economy slows. They can't run significant deficits (or at least they aren't supposed to), which means they have to cover those outlays with tax revenue, so means they can't reduce taxes enough to make any difference. They can't use fiscal policy to stimulate the economy because they all gave up their currencies, and the European Central Bank was chartered with the sole goal of preventing inflation of the Euro and has not been as aggressive as the Fed at cutting interest rates to provide economic stimulus. That's caused the Euro to rise relative to the dollar (or the dollar to fall relative to the Euro, depending on your point of view), which has made European exports and European vacations expensive and less competitive for Americans and for anyone else whose currencies tend to track the US$, while making European imports (especially of petroleum) more expensive.
It's politically impossible for them to significantly reduce the regulatory burden on businesses, especially with regard to making it easier for them to lay off employees. So the basic factors which lead business leaders to make investment and expansion decisions conservatively and defensively won't change, and the governments there don't have any other ways of applying stimulus. This doesn't tend to make one optimistic about the future, and even as the US seems to be recovering from its most recent recession, Europe's economic problems are getting worse and forecasts for growth have been reduced several times.