What a time to be reading @adam_tooze's _Crashed_. Just finished the G20 chapter, which makes the case that the most dynamic fiscal stimulus in face of economic collapse came in Asia (w/ China's stupefying sums in the lead) & emerging markets. EU parsimony sowed its later crisis.

More _Crashed_ prefiguring today: pp. 368-369 on lashing QE took from combined EU, China, & EM. Pithy sum up US response: "If others wanted to prevent their currencies from appreciating, all they had to do was match the Fed's low interest rates with expansion of their own."

More: "It was Germany's export dependence and China's determination to peg its currency that put the US in charge. If they wanted to free ride on American aggregate demand, they should at least have the grace to do so quietly."

EU banks looked at it quite differently:

p.371: "Far from the Fed increasing insecurity of the world economy, it was, in effect, acting as the world's piggybank."
...
"It was not a recipe for economic expansion, but...it did at least promise a cushion of stability."

I don't know if it was intentional or incidental, but reading _Crashed_ almost makes you feel the agonizing trudge of the EU's internecine struggle over its hobbled fringe. The always late, taking solutions off the table only to grudgingly put them back on after they're no use.

Roughly 40% of a 600-odd page book ties back, in some manner, to the pitched battle between Germany and Greece.

It's interesting to think of this book alongside _The Deluge_. @adam_tooze managed to write a WWI book that understatedly centralizes burgeoning US power, and a 2008 financial crisis book centered on German political economic pathologies. Daring--and rewarding--inversions, both.

And, in random fortuitousness of interest to maybe 7 people who follow me, I've been reading _Crashed_ not only alongside the COVID crisis, but also alongside Stigum's _The Money Market_. I can't recall a better food-wine pairing.