Ah yes, if the troubled European nations would just spend a lot more money they don't actually have while not paying off any of their debts, while pretending they could ever afford the vast welfare states they built, they would find themselves prosperous again. Keynesian faith based economics at its finest. Spend what you don't have, run up debts you can never pay back, and print your way deeper into destruction when all else fails, because inflation is easier to lie about than an equivalent austerity cut.
Keynesian economics, turning first world countries into second world countries since 1936.
You pan Keynesian economics as misguided, and while I'd agree that ramping up public spending is not the solution everytime, clearly austerity is not leading to the "investor confidence" that would spur growth in the periphery. The truth is, no approach is going to work in every situation, but it's almost foolish to say austerity was the best approach to the Eurocrisis.
Of course there are complications when you're dealing with a common currency, but the budget constraints and subsequent skyrocketing of debt hasn't alleviated the situation. If anything its burdened the finances of the periphery with an unbelievable amount of default risk, which if I understand austerity economics correctly, that is exactly what it's meant to avoid via boosting investor confidence. Odd how even though results were different, people still believe it's a good solution to the Eurozone's woes.
Are we just going to pretend that Keynesian economics is some obviously foolhardy strategy and hasn't worked repeatedly in the past? It is understood to have worked with particularly great effect in Australia following the GFC.
No offense, but this comment betrays a very limited understanding of the situation.
First of all, the European countries with the strongest welfare states do just fine. Also, social expenditures are not actually much different in the United States compared to EU countries -- it's just that more of it comes out of pocket [1]; in the end, it still comes out of your paycheck (as an employee) or profit (if self-employed). In fact, the US has higher net social expenditures than Spain (as a percentage of GDP).
Second, money creation does not work the way you understand it. The majority of what economists call the M2 money supply is not created by the government or the central bank, but by private banks through fractional reserve banking [2], i.e. loans.
And as a matter of fact, the M2 money supply [3] in Greece [4] and Spain [5] has cratered in recent years. The private banks have been "unprinting" money, if you like that terminology. While in theory this might have come from money being transferred to Germany etc., money supply growth across the Eurozone as a whole has also slowed down since the crisis [6], as opposed to the US [7]. Note that it is normal for the money supply to grow with the economy, even absent inflation, because M2 (= money in circulation) is an indirect indicator of economic activity.
Finally, much as "printing money" is favored as a term by some people, this is not actually what Quantitative Easing is. What Quantitative Easing does (simplifying a bit) is a central bank making loans in lieu of the private banks when the latter fail to do so in sufficient measure. The QE process has the central bank buying private assets with money it created to compensate for a shortage in the money supply; the crucial difference (compared to printing money) is that the process is easily reversible; when the economy recovers, the central bank sells these assets again and destroys the money it gets back. Thus, the central bank retains control over the total money supply. QE is what the US Fed has been doing to prop up the money supply in recent years because Congress couldn't get its act together.
Borrowing, likewise, is in the current situation in no way comparable to "printing" money. In fact, short term government bonds of most developed countries (T-bills or their equivalent) not called Greece, Spain, or Italy go for yields below the very low inflation rate: investors buy bonds even though they're technically losing money; similarly, those governments could technically make money by borrowing more at the moment because the aforementioned investors are willing to loan it to them at effective negative rates.
Keynesian economics, turning first world countries into second world countries since 1936.