(Community Matters) If I were an unemployed Spaniard, that would be my rallying cry. Krugman sees this as an undesirable course of action – I’m not so sure.
I’m not so compelled by the good for globalization or regionalization of Europe’s economies. One only has to look around the world to see that individual protectionist barriers prevent a level playing field. All too often, a country’s blue collar workers absorb “the tax” while their financial industry enjoys the gain – if not gain, certainly the eventual bailout. Icelanders and Estonians have served themselves well by saying no fucking way.
Community Matters 
I don’t think Krugman considers abandoning the euro undesirable, merely a last resort. He has long been on record as having opposed the creation of the euro in the first place, and for reasons that are now obvious: by yoking together under a common currency a group of countries with widely differing economic policies and political cultures, you ensure that a catastrophe affecting any one of them (Ireland, Greece, or Spain, for example) will threaten to pull down all of them, leading countries with healthier economies to impose draconian “remedies” on the sicker ones.
President Merkel and the German bankers seem to have learned only one lesson from Germany’s experience in the 1930s: inflation can easily get out of hand and become ruinous. They might want to take to heart another truth from that time: whenever Germany heedlessly imposes its will on its neighbors, things tend to quickly get out of hand and become ruinous.