What Germany was benefiting from was something akin to the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by the United States in the global economy. At times of stress, global money moved into dollars. In the eurozone, money moved to Germany.35 It was a privilege measured by the yield spread. As the yields on crisis-country bonds soared, those on Bunds eased. It was one of the factors that helped to feed Germany’s prosperity bubble. That a flow of funds into Germany should come to be seen as a burden was symptomatic of the feverish discourse of the crisis.
