Una nueva víctima de la crisis, Holanda, que puede sucumbir al estilo que lo hizo Japón en los 90.
The coalition of Mark Rutte has belatedly woken up to the danger. Last month it retreated from pro-cyclical tightening, delaying €4.3bn in budget austerity. By then Mr Rutte’s totemic worship of EU deficit targets had invited the ridicule of the official Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), which said Dutch leaders did not seem to understand how private credit busts interact with fiscal cuts to create havoc.
“The Dutch government’s inability to acknowledge the damage done by austerity despite mounting evidence is a case of ‘cognitive dissonance’,” it told the Financial Times.
Yet this is not at root a case of botched fiscal policy. It is a case of misaligned monetary policy. The Netherlands offers a salutary lesson of what can happen to a rich sophisticated economy caught in a post-bubble crunch once it has lost control of its currency, central bank and monetary levers. This would have happened to Britain without the Bank of England, and the US without the Fed.
The Dutch crisis has crept up quietly, though hedge funds have been nibbling for months. Most people lump the Netherlands together with Germany, Finland and Austria, the hardline AAA fist-thumpers who dictate terms to others.
Unemployment was very low until the dam broke. It is now soaring as fast as in Cyprus. The rate has doubled over the past two years, jumping from 7.7pc to 8.1pc in the single month of March. The economy has been in recession since early 2011.