A great explanation of the issues in Europe

Crooked Timber has a great “pick your own adventure” style post on solving the European debt crisis (ht Eric Crampton).  Give it a go.

Eric and my work colleague here both hit option 52, while I hit option 54.  To see what 54 is I’ll repeat it below:

Maynard is staring at his legal pad. “This looks like a mess to me. Greece has defaulted, left the euro, and had a tax commissioner appointed – how many more humiliations can you heap on them? Economically it has a certain internal logic but politically it is all over the place and I think that kills the chance of the transfer payments which you need if you’re going to achieve primary balance after the default without massively contractionary domestic fiscal policy. We can type it up and submit it, but I think it’s only going to be looked at as an example of the kind of idea that an economist might come up with”.

The kind of an idea an economist might come up with – I’m taking that as a compliment even though I suspect it isn’t meant to be …