Italian Industry Is Getting Smashed

REUTERS/Alessandro GarofaloItalian prime minister Matteo Renzi.Italian industrial output for September is just in, and it's ugly.

Output dropped 0.9% from August to September, and is down 2.9% on 12 months ago. That's firm recession territory.

Economists were expecting a 0.2% drop from August and a 0.7% drop from September last year. Italy is the eurozone's third biggest economy, and that's a brutal figure for what was meant to be a year of recovery for the struggling currency union.

Data on Wednesday will give us a look at the eurozone's industrial production production as a whole for September, but there's no doubt that Italy will now be a major drag on that figure.