Europe is in the maw of a deflationary contraction. It is in big trouble. Today the European Central Bank is issuing plans to buy sovereign bonds in a scheme that is similar to the USA's QE. But the Euro plan is tiny by comparison.
Here's an analysis in the Economist by Yanis Varoufakis:
http://www.economist.com/...
To boil all this down for you, he is arguing that the lack of stimulus and investment is only going to create paper profits and asset bubbles (which benefit the rich mostly). In terms of the USA, we see this same critique that Krugman provided in 2009. He argued that the stimulus was too meager, and that the constraint (by some Democrats especially who fell for all that porkulus talk) would lead us to just get by economically. When the President was hamstrung, he had to resort to round after round of QE, which has lead to a 300% increase in the Dow from the depths of the market crash until now.
The key here is that the shackles on monetary policy lead to huge gains for the rich. There is little to no investment in infrastructure, education, research. All these have been cut in the USA.
Now Europe is embarking on the same misbegotten approach, and worse, they waited 5 years to do it.
The analyst is eminently reasonable, and he's also the economic policy force behind the Syriza party in Greece. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas-Austin, and the resident economics guru at online gaming platform Valve in Seattle.
We are now at a time when the media portrays people like him as crazy Marxist radical, but the proposals of people like him are the only reasonable ones.