Brussels Edition: Breaking Europe’s Fall

Welcome to the Brussels Edition, Bloomberg’s daily briefing on what matters most in the heart of the European Union. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weekday morning.

There’s little doubt now that Europe is heading for recession, as ever vaster swaths of its economy are shut down in a desperate attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Over a video call today, EU finance ministers will seek to come up with a plan to steer towards a hard landing rather than a catastrophic crash. The main elements of their response were laid out last week — in successive stimulus announcements by governments, the Commission’s effective suspension of state-aid rules for battered companies, and the ECB’s liquidity measures. The challenge for ministers today is to turn this impressive patchwork into a coherent narrative in order to restore confidence — and morale — to an increasingly claustrophobic continent.