The Real News network does it again. Is the Euro Crisis Over? is a conversation among William K. Black, Paolo Manasse, and John Weeks where they discuss the Euro and the danger of global recession. The interviewer is Paul Jay of The Real News.

There is one dissenter in the panel about the issue of Germany’s Beggar Thy Neighbor policy that has had much discussion in other interviews and posts on The Real News. For Paolo Manasse who emphasizes productivity gains in Germany versus a Beggar Thy Neighbor policy, I think that a discussion of his definition of these productivity gains would have shown that there is really no disagreement on what happened. They did not have time to go into it, but I bet that Manasse is talking about productivity as the amount produced per unit cost of labor, not per hour of labor.

If that were the case, then what Germany did to get that productivity is exactly a Beggar Thy Neighbor policy. They cut their wages so that they could produce more cheaply than their neighbors despite agreeing not to do that. They then transferred their unemployment and slow growth problems onto their neighbors in order to only solve their own problems. (We do have such competition among states in this country when it comes to state taxing policy, labor policy, and state subsidies to entice businesses to move from one state to another.)

For balance, you can watch the entire video.

However, for my purposes, I’ll just quote something that William Black said in the video. This is from the transcript provided by The Real News. Let me start off with the description of who William Black is:

William K. Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics. A former financial regulator, he held several senior regulatory positions during the S&L debacle. Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One (2005) which focuses on the role of control fraud in financial crises. Black developed the concept of “control fraud” – frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a “weapon.” Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.

Now, for what it is he said in one segment of the video.

BLACK: The new credit facility provides exceptionally low-cost funds to banks, well below supposed market rates. And it’s a way of transferring wealth to the banking sector. And I agree with both of my colleagues, there’s absolutely no reason to do it this way except ideology about the role of the ECB. Obama is correct that Europe has more than ample funds to deal with the crisis, but it has allowed it to twist slowly in the wind, and it has exposed the fact that the leading proponents of ever closer union, France and Germany, didn’t really mean it. In other words, once Greece got in trouble, well, it was the damn Greeks that got in trouble; it wasn’t my fellow countrymen analog in the United States, say, when New Orleans has a hurricane. You know, you bail out Louisiana, whether or not you particularly like Louisiana. But Europe is not a united nation. It’s not close to a united nation. And Germany is imposing policies that are exceptionally destructive to the rest of Europe. And so, ultimately, it is completely ideologically driven. You have insanity, after all, going on, where if you go to Ireland, the official policy mandated by the rest of Europe is to cut your wages so that you can out-export the Portuguese. But if you go to Portugal, the strategy is to slash working class wages so you can out-export the Irish. And this is the road to Bangladesh strategy. And it is quite clear that France, Germany, Netherlands are quite willing to saw off the periphery of Europe. They just can’t figure out a way to do it without hurting their own banks.

Remember, I am not saying this is the whole story. You have to spend the time to watch the video or read the whole transcript, if you want the whole story.