Increasingly, that is exactly what seems to be happening: European factories are producing fewer goods, automobile exports are plunging and surveys show that business managers around the Continent are nervous.

A clearer picture of the damage from trade tensions will come Thursday, when economists for the European Central Bank publish their latest forecasts. The report will most likely examine whether trade is having a tangible impact on growth — and the question is certain to come up when Mario Draghi, the central bank’s president, holds a news conference after a meeting of the bank’s monetary policy committee.

Barring a surprisingly pessimistic economic assessment, the central bank is not expected to make any major changes Thursday. The Governing Council has outlined a plan for winding down emergency stimulus measures and shows no sign of changing course, despite a plethora of new risks.

“The ECB remains on autopilot,” Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at the German unit of Dutch bank ING, said in a note to clients.

The meeting comes almost exactly 10 years after the collapse of Lehman Bros. In a measure of the impact of that event, the central bank is still coping with the aftermath — the stimulus measures being phased out have their origins in that era.

The European Central Bank’s plan for returning to normalcy includes a sharp reduction of its purchases of government bonds and other assets, a form of monetary stimulus. The purchases will drop by half after September, to 15 billion euros ($17.5 billion) per month, and end altogether after December. The bank has signaled that it will begin raising official interest rates from record lows late next year.

The economic assessment to be published by the European Central Bank’s in-house economists is likely to point to some bright spots in the eurozone that will affirm the bank’s determination to continue dialing down stimulus.

The French economy is looking perkier. Eurozone unemployment, at 8.2 percent, is lower than it has been since just after Lehman collapsed. Wages in the common currency area are rising after years of meager growth.

But the list of risks is growing. The economy of Turkey, an important trading partner, is slowing sharply. Talks with Britain to negotiate an amicable divorce with the European Union are deadlocked. And German car exports slumped in July, probably because buyers are unsettled by the trade war, analysts say.

Trade is easily the biggest worry for European companies. For the moment, an uneasy truce prevails between Europe and the United States on trade. Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, agreed after a meeting in July not to impose more punitive tariffs on each other while they try to negotiate a broad trade deal.

But European political leaders and business managers are nervous that Trump could grow restive if the talks do not produce quick results — and they probably will not. The European Commission is methodical in its approach, and hamstrung by the need to get approval from its 28 member states.

“There is really nothing the union can do to expedite its decisions on trade,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director in London at Eurasia Group, a political consultancy.

U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports remain in place, raising prices and disrupting intricate supply chains. The Commerce Department continues to examine whether foreign-made cars are a threat to national security, a process that would create the legal foundation for the 25 percent tariffs on auto imports that Trump has threatened.

Trump seems to thrive on keeping people guessing, but businesses hate uncertainty. As long as the Damocles sword of Trump tariffs hangs above the eurozone, companies will be hesitant to buy new machinery or expand operations.

They are right to worry. Oxford Economics in London estimates that a full-blown trade war, including auto tariffs, would shrink the European economy more than 1 percent and cost 1.6 million jobs. Such a severe downturn would certainly prompt the European Central Bank to reverse course, but it would not be able to prevent substantial pain.

“A trans-Atlantic trade war would have a severe economic impact on both the European and U.S. economies,” Oxford Economics said in a report in August. “There would be no winners.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Jack Ewing © 2018 The New York Times