“...it’s a weak argument to simply blame the guy who showed you how to do it.”
My neighbors credit card debt has nothing to do with me, regardless of how badly I may have managed mine.
And while it may make good politics for Europeans to blame the US, these are structural problems with the European economies that have existed for decades made worse by the adoption of the Euro.
Greece, Spain, Italy, et. all. are not doing anything they haven’t been doing for decades, only this time, because of the Euro, they can’t inflate the problem away.
The European Commission’s top economists warned the politicians in the 1990s that the euro might not survive a crisis, at least in its current form. There is no EU treasury or debt union to back it up. The one-size-fits-all regime of interest rates caters badly to the different needs of Club Med and the German bloc.And now, what are EU member state governments calling for? Exactly what the “euro fathers” were hoping to do—create their central all-powerful government. Destroying the US economy was part of the deal, in order to help the EU ascend rapidly to superpower status once all the pieces were in place.
The euro fathers did not dispute this. But they saw EMU as an instrument to force the pace of political union. They welcomed the idea of a “beneficial crisis”. As ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government. …