"In the short term, what's not to like? But there comes a point when you realize that you've been funding this on credit, that you've been depending on external assistance, and that your productivity has fallen further and further behind until you've got to the stage that we've now reached where it takes 4 Germans to work the same hours as 3 Americans. And that in the long term that is just not sustainable. Europe now that it's in a globalized economy competing against China and India and indeed North America, finds that it is shrinking precipitously. In the 1970s, in 1974, Europe accounted for 36%, or Western Europe, for 36% of World GDP. Today it's 25%, 10 years from now it will be 15%. That is an extraordinary decline, over a period when the US share of world GDP has remained pretty steady, round about 26%. So there was always going to be a reckoning and I'm afraid that reckoning has come now."

-- Daniel Hannan https://youtu.be/Ufyov9RO8I0?t=648