American policy makers can only blame the state, and occasionally the banks, but never the market. To do so is somehow un-American—as if fealty to Wall Street is the same as honoring the Constitution. Meanwhile, European policy makers seem to be trapped in a room with a monetary doomsday device, an overlevered banking system on the brink, and a German instruction sheet for defusing the thing that makes the problem worse rather than better.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 259