Mortgages are 20 to 30 year things. If you're going to cut wages slowly enough to not trigger an insolvency cascade from distressed mortgages, you don't need to cut them in nominal terms at all. Even at the BuBa's neurotic inflation target, simply keeping them stationary in nominal terms for thirty years would do the job.

Of course, if you do that, you're looking at a literal lost generation. Which means, again, tanks in the streets.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

You think the shock doctrine people are gradualists?

We don't have 50 years to reduce real wages by 1% a year. These people want Greece at 3% deficit in 2009

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker