| European officials announced on two separate occasions this week that they are intentionally pursuing policies that will, at least in the short term, impede Europe’s economic growth. At first glance, such measures would appear to constitute acts of self-sabotage. Why would the EU consciously enact policies that harm its own economy? Yet, the officials assure us, there is method to this madness. Such policies, they say, are necessary to prevent a resurgence of Europe’s inflation crisis, which is finally abating after plaguing the European economy for much of the past two years. The EU’s actions are arguably reminiscent of Odysseus’ conduct in one of the more famous episodes in Homer’s Odyssey: In figurative terms, the EU is tying itself to a mast of policies to avoid an economic siren song that promises stronger growth but will ultimately only deliver fatally high inflation. The first such announcement was made on Monday (11 March), when the Eurogroup, the informal regular gathering of eurozone finance ministers, revealed that the EU’s stringent new fiscal rules mean that member states will have to cut government spending next year. “At the current juncture, fiscal stimulus would stimulate inflation more than growth [and] correspondingly higher financing costs for the governments,” European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a press conference on Tuesday (12 March), following a question by Euractiv. | 