Over the New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman has today’s must-read economics article on the fate of Europe. (Today’s in the physical world; it’s been up electronically for several days.)
Krugman walks through various ways that struggling Eurozone members might adjust to their ongoing financial crisis.
Along the way, he emphasizes a key point: American housing and mortgage markets were not the only cause of the global crisis:
You still hear people talking about the global economic crisis of 2008 as if it were something made in America. But Europe deserves equal billing. This was, if you like, a North Atlantic crisis, with not much to choose between the messes of the Old World and the New. We had our subprime borrowers, who either chose to take on or were misled into taking on mortgages too big for their incomes; they had their peripheral economies, which similarly borrowed much more than they could really afford to pay back. In both cases, real estate bubbles temporarily masked the underlying unsustainability of the borrowing: as long as housing prices kept rising, borrowers could always pay back previous loans with more money borrowed against their properties. Sooner or later, however, the music would stop. Both sides of the Atlantic were accidents waiting to happen.
Financial sector has to cope with its public preception.