Spain - the fifth victim to fall in Europe's arc of depression

Philip Whyte and Simon Tilford argue in a paper for the CER that this is a "damagingly partial and self-serving" version of events. "It wrongly assigns all the blame for peripheral indebtedness to government profligacy; it makes no mention of the far from innocent role played by creditor countries in the run-up to the crisis. The result was an explosion of current-account imbalances inside the eurozone. As a share of GDP, these imbalances were far bigger than those between the US and China," they said. ..."The eurozone crisis is as much a tale of excess bank leverage and poor risk management in the core as of excess consumption and wasteful investment in the periphery," said the CER paper. ..."Too much virtue has become a collective vice. The collective outcome of all member-states tightening fiscal policy has proved brutally contractionary for the region as a whole," said the CER paper.