There they go again

For about the past year and a half, the Euro has been running stronger than the dollar -- sometimes a little stronger, sometimes much stronger. And for the most part everyone's been coping passably, although the shift has been noticeably more painful for some European exporters than for others.

But does this signal that the Euro is the new "master currency," that the Euro-zone is now poised to rival America's economic hegemony? Some Americans seem worried about this. They needn't be.

European deficit spending is why. Years after the Euro-zone big boys started violating the currency's Stability and Growth Pact restrictions on deficit spending, the member nations have agreed to move the goal posts. I'm already on record discussing the relative merits of deficits American- and Euro-style. Here it suffices simply to point out that in America, the Congress' latest budgetary adventurism suggests that the lunatics are running the asylum. Europe, however, now seems to have a much more serious problem: No one is running the asylum.