GARY CLYDE HUFBAUER: Nonresident Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Count me a skeptic--at least for another decade. Germany is not about to give the European Commission unconstrained authority to issue debt. Mini "Hamiltonian moments" will no doubt recur as Europe lurches from crisis to crisis. But if the U.S. Treasury had to secure acquiescence from the largest states plus Congress, U.S. national debt would never have reached $25 trillion. Commission authority akin to the U.S. Treasury's writ, even with a debt cap, is something for the European future.

Moreover, amid pandemic, it's easy to forget that inflation has been the dominant monetary phenomenon of the...