let me play the centrist social-liberal on your last point. I think that the fight against inflation, and the desire to have a strong currency, are valid long term policies, and do require a tough central bank, as the Bundesbank was and as the ECB is, to a lesser extent.  That's what gives you an economy more focused on high value, price-insensitive goods.

This does not preclude high wages (quite the opposite in fact), as Germany shows, and only requires that wage increases be in line with productivity increases.

The recent crunch on Germa nwages has come from the combination of an overvalued DM entering the euro (misplaced pride), and the zeitgeist of relentless focus on company profits, which has unfairly tipped the balance too far in sharing productivity gains.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes