Lack of proper pricing also encourages profligate use and wastage.

sent in from your Lord for the profligate , never far from the wrongdoers.

sent in from your Lord for the profligate , never far from the wrongdoers.

Indeed you come to men with desire instead of women! Indeed, you are a profligate lot.

Indeed you come to men with desire instead of women! Indeed, you are a profligate lot.

Then he asked, Why should China sacrifice our growth so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?

All of the Western religions begin with the notion of Eden, and descend through a kind of profligate present to a very ugly future.

His first adventure was with a party of those men whose profligate ways could be conducted with safety only under the protection of red coats.

But this is politically impossible at present, because Germany is adamantly opposed to serving as the deep pocket for its profligate partners. Therefore, makeshift arrangements will have to be found.

Greece s creditors, by contrast, felt that they had generously saved a profligate country from bankruptcy. This narrative allowed policymakers in Germany to disregard the fact that their country s banks had financed Greek borrowing for too long.

With no limit, profligate countries could go on a spending spree at the expense of thriftier ones. After the advent of the euro, the eurozone s Mediterranean members enjoyed a lending boom while piggybacking on Germany s low interest rates.

Germany worries that, without strict supervision of banks and budgets, it will be left holding the bag for its more profligate neighbors. But that misses the key point Spain, Ireland, and many other distressed countries ran budget surpluses before the crisis.

A government cannot liquidate its deficit if the source of its revenues, the national income, is diminishing. It is deficit reduction, not debt, that is profligate, because it implies wastage of available human and physical capital, quite apart from the resulting misery.

Proposals to limit moral hazard, meanwhile, would do so by limiting Eurobonds to 60 of GDP the eurozone s current ceiling for member states public debt. A more substantial constraint would be to establish a tougher disciplinary regime on fiscally profligate countries as part of a reinforced institutional framework.

Most importantly, while the average debt GDP ratio is no higher than it is in other advanced countries, and consolidation efforts started earlier, the eurozone has been mired in a severe crisis of confidence for the past two years. This points to a systemic dimension of the crisis that cannot be reduced to profligate behavior by fiscal sinners.

But any solution will be unacceptable unless it finds broad acceptance across Europe, in debtor and creditor countries alike. There is no reason why a constitutional solution that involves debt limitation should not command a large measure of public acceptance, especially in debtor countries, which have experienced the political and economic damage caused by previous profligate governments.

In Germany, ECB purchases of bonds issued by Greece and other periphery countries are widely thought to constitute monetary financing of profligate governments, in violation of the treaty under which the ECB was established. The German Constitutional Court believes that the OMT scheme exceeds the ECB s mandate, though it has temporarily tossed that political hot potato to the European Court of Justice.

The list of growth obstacles in emerging markets is even longer corruption and weak rule of law, state capture, organized crime, poor infrastructure, an unskilled workforce, limited access to finance, and too much state ownership. In addition, markets of all sizes and levels of development continue to suffer from protectionism, restrictions on foreign capital flows, rising economic populism, and profligate or poorly targeted welfare programs.

There is a market failure when it comes to energy, but government intervention should run in precisely the opposite direction from what the Bush administration has proposed. The fact that Americans do not pay the full price for the pollution especially enormous contributions to greenhouse gases that results from their profligate energy use means that energy is under priced, in turn sustaining excessive consumption.

These policies would require Germany to accept higher inflation and explicit bank losses, which assumes that Germans can embrace a different narrative about the nature of the crisis. And that means that German leaders must portray the crisis not as a morality play pitting lazy, profligate southerners against hard working, frugal northerners, but as a crisis of interdependence in an economic (and nascent political) union.

Profligate members were supposed to be forced by the Stability and Growth Pact, as well as by their peers, to live within their means and thus strengthen their competiveness. Instead, Germany s former social democratic government weakened the pact when doing so was politically convenient, while less competitive eurozone members allowed wages to rise and the public sector to become bloated, and then looked away as easy credit fueled both debt and asset bubbles.

That theory runs counter to much historical experience, as well as to the prevailing approach to central banking that emerged in the 1990 s. According to that view, investors punish profligate states by demanding higher interest rates to hedge against the likelihood of inflation so the best way to ensure low borrowing costs is to give central banks as much independence from politicians as possible, and then make price stability their primary mandate.