Europe is once again on the brink of economic calamity, and yet its policymakers don’t even know it. Locked in a bubble of complacency, they think of the current slowdown as just a temporary interruption, caused primarily by Donald Trump’s trade war with China and political uncertainty around Brexit.

Yet all over the shop, the economic indicators are flashing red. The jobs miracle of recent years is fizzling out, with economic contraction contagiously spreading between sectors and geographic regions. An already apparent global recession in manufacturing and business investment is fast spilling over into construction and dominant service sectors. The handbrake turn in monetary policy under way among the world’s leading central banks may have come too late to prevent a pile up.

It’s a curiosity of Trump’s trade wars that the main protagonists, the United States and China, have so far been comparatively unaffected by them. Instead the biggest victim appears to be Europe, and particularly Germany, which is almost certainly already in technical recession.

Relatively high exposure to external demand has made Europe especially vulnerable to the slowdown in global trade. Exports are a much bigger proportion of Eurozone GDP than they are of US and Chinese output. Emboldened by last week’s World Trade Organisation ruling on Boeing, sanctioning US tariffs on $7.5bn (£6.1bn) of European exports, Trump is all too likely to switch fronts in his trade war from China to Europe in the months ahead, threatening a direct hit on top of already substantial collateral damage.