Business & Finance News

(Bloomberg) — Europe’s leaders may be united on the need to throw money at economies during the coronavirus crisis, but they have yet to confront how to pay for it all.

That reckoning could force governments across the region into tough choices about where to lay the burden among voters already disillusioned with political establishments — a decade after the global financial crisis presented them with previous bills to settle.

Europe’s austerity experiments since then, from Greece to the U.K., provide cautionary tales of either the economic damage or electoral fatigue that spending cuts can cause. With those bitter experiences in mind, politicians are already fielding questions about tax hikes on either wealth or income — even if they too might threaten to hurt growth.

Alternatives include tolerating higher debts such as Japan does, or perhaps trying to inflict a dose of inflation to erode them away — itself a