Recently the Market Monetarist bloggers have come out with a number of comments on the euro crisis. It’s a joy reading them – despite the tragic background.

Here is a bit of brilliant comments. Lets start with Scott Sumner:

“Many people seem to be under the illusion that Germany is a rich country. It isn’t. It’s a thrifty country. German per capita income (PPP) is more than 20% below US levels, below the level of Alabama and Arkansas. If you consider those states to be “rich,” then by all means go on calling Germany a rich country. The Germans know they aren’t rich, and they certainly aren’t going to be willing to throw away their hard earned money on another failed EU experiment. That’s not to say the current debt crisis won’t end up costing the German taxpayers. That’s now almost unavoidable, given the inevitable Greek default. But they should not and will not commit to an open-ended fiscal union, i.e. to “taxation without representation.”

Scott as usual it is right on the nail…further comments are not needed.

But it is not really about whether Alabama…eh Germany… is rich enough to bail out the rest of Europe. The question is why some (all?) euro zone are in trouble. David Glasner has the answer:

“…the main cause of the debt crisis is that incomes are not growing fast enough to generate enough free cash flow to pay off the fixed nominal obligations incurred by the insolvent, nearly insolvent, or potentially insolvent Eurozone countries. Even worse, stagnating incomes impose added borrowing requirements on governments to cover expanding fiscal deficits. When a private borrower, having borrowed in expectation of increased future income, becomes insolvent, regaining solvency just by reducing expenditures is rarely possible. So if the borrower’s income doesn’t increase, the options are usually default and bankruptcy or a negotiated write down of the borrower’s indebtedness to creditors. A community or a country is even less likely than an individual to regain solvency through austerity, because the reduced spending of one person diminishes the incomes earned by others (the paradox of thrift), meaning that austerity may impair the income-earning, and, hence, the debt-repaying, capacity of the community as a whole.”

See also my comment on Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.