Your Global Economic Mess Is Now Being Served

Bad leadership and tepid tactics are cooking up a double dip. Come on, folks, get it together!

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Spanish Civil Guards fire rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse demonstrating miners in Campomanes, near Oviedo in northern Spain on May 30, 2012

If there were an official anthem for the European debt crisis, it would be Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," and not just because the pop star croons a few lines in French and chants the name of a continental capital. The once slow, now increasingly fast-moving economic disaster unfolding across the Atlantic is best understood as a really, really dysfunctional relationship.

As Harvard economist Ken Rogoff puts it, "Europe is like a couple that wasn't sure they wanted to get married, so instead they decided to just open a joint checking account and see how things went." They went badly. Germany, the...

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