Will it be dubbed D-Day or Black Thursday?

If Europe plunges into recession, Thursday 14 August is likely to enter into that hall of financial history's infamous dates.

Germany was the first to start adding the minus signs to its results for gross domestic product: 0.5 per cent negative growth in the last quarter. The figure is all the more stark when compared with German GDP increases for the first three months of the year, a robust 1.3 per cent.

Less than 45 minutes later, France added another splash of red to the picture: 0.3 per cent in the last quarter.

And a short while later, the European Commission emptied the paint can onto the canvas: Euro zone GDP down 0.2 per cent.

Of course, economists had been expecting those figures for weeks.

Finance chiefs like the European Central Bank (ECB) head, Jean-Claude Trichet, and his Bank of England counterpart, Mervyn King, have been telling us we're in for a rough ride.

But they've also danced around the R-word - recession - quite a bit, thinking Europe might be able to avoid the worst knock-on effects of the global slowdown.

On Wednesday King talked about a "chill in the air" and went only as far as describing the possibility of the UK recording two successive quarters of negative growth - the classic model of a recession.

France's Finance Minister Christine Lagarde also did her bit to head off recession talk moments after announcing the results on France Inter radio.

"It's not a question of talking about recession," she said.

Lagarde thinks that inflation in France, at least, has peaked and that the economy will start to pick up around the end of this year or beginning of 2009.

That's a view shared by other governments such as the UK.

Yet try telling that to people who see the signs of recession everywhere: the record price hikes in fuel and groceries; and a housing bubble burst after galloping rises - in the UK and Spain at least.

Even if Europe is over the worst of the knock-on effects of the global slowdown, growth isn't likely to resume until the ECB brings interest rates down from 4.25 per cent to nearer its target of 2 per cent.

Trichet has been keeping the rate on hold until he's sure that inflation has stopped rising.

But when? It's still going up all over Europe and likely to be compounded by higher wage demands.

The strengthening Euro is hammering exports outside the EU - a particular headache for Germany, the world's biggest exporter.

At best, we're in for a dose of stagflation - low growth and creeping inflation.

But at worst, we're marching into another period of negative growth and by then no one will be dancing around the R- word anymore.