That spread is now about 250 basis points, although it has narrowed significantly in recent weeks. *  *  *  Weaving a monetary policy path through the thickets of bubbles and deflations and their possible aftermath is not something with which modern central bankers have had much experience.
A painful lesson from the last few years is that we all underestimated the destructive potential that myopic national policies could exert on the euro area’s collective body, and on the world economy as a whole. It is time to remove the institutional shortcomings that allowed imbalances to build up in the national economies and escalate into systemic threats in the first place.