Having read the first half of Bernanke's book on the Great Depression - the part about banking, labor economics not really holding a lot of interest to me - this post about the intentional, planned, and deliberate recessionary policies of three of Europe's largest countries for the next few years is inducing a severe case of deja vu in yours truly. We have a multinational monetary union of sorts - the interwar gold standard in Bernanke's text, the European Money Union in the contemporary case - whose internal logic is absolute insanity viewed from ground level. Any American public official who stated that they were planning to induce a severe recession, for any reason, would be figuratively and quite possibly literally lynched by the general public.

Europe is such a strange continent...