The euro and its issuer, the European Central Bank, are under attack these days, especially in Germany and Italy. Bloomberg reports that Stern Magazine reports that a German Finance Ministry report blames the euro for Germany’s economic stagnation:

The introduction of the euro has cost Germany its former advantage of lower financing costs, which partially explains why it's lagging behind the other euro members, the ministry said in the report, according to Stern.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Stern commissioned a recent poll in which a majority of Germans said they would rather still have the DMark than the euro. A common complaint, reported as fact by the Sun-Times:

The euro requires a one-size-fits-all interest rate policy set by the European Central Bank, meaning countries with lagging growth can no longer resort to rate cuts.

The usually sensible blogger Jane Galt has joined the piling-on:

There is some truth to the accusation. The ECB monetary policy is wildly inappropriate for Germany, which currently has low inflation and slow growth.

Meanwhile, Forbes reports that the Italian welfare minister Robert Maroni has suggested that Italy should consider at least temporarily readopting the lira:

In an interview with the daily La Repubblica, Maroni said the introduction of the euro has not been an adequate measure to tackle an economic slowdown and a decline in competitiveness in Italy.

It would therefore be 'better' to temporarily have a dual circulation of the euro and the lira in Italy, he said.

Unfortunately, as much as I like criticism of central banks, these critics are attacking the ECB on specious grounds. They basically complain that the ECB isn’t inflating enough to promote growth in Germany and Italy. The critics have an entirely wishful notion of what expansionary monetary policy can do. A cheap-money policy simply can’t enhance sustainable growth, which depends instead on real factors like adoption of technological improvements, capital accumulation, and labor market flexibility. Cheap money from the central bank, by temporarily lowering real interest rates, can at most promote a temporary surge of unsustainable growth that lapses into later stagnation. Germany and Italy have stagnation first and foremost because of labor market inflexibilities that cheap money will do nothing to fix.