But the European debt crisis is a different story. While I won’t go into it now, it is noteworthy that the same sequence of events followed, in that policy makers didn’t believe they would face a debt crisis until they had it. When it came, they made the same rookie mistakes of leaning too heavily on deflationary levers like austerity and of not printing money and of not providing protections against defaults for systemically important entities until the pain became intolerable.
