Economics: Their Own Private Europe

The lesson of the Irish debacle .... doesn't say cut spending now, or bad things will happen; it says that balanced budgets won't protect you from crisis if you don't effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation helped create our own catastrophe.

For more, see Their Own Private Europe by Paul Krugman, January 27, 2011 at The New York Times.