By which I mean that he isn’t Serious. His latest on Greece and the euro suggests that the deeper problems lie not in Greek fecklessness but in the refusal of the core — basically Germany — to allow either monetary or fiscal policies that would offset the downdraft from austerity in the periphery. He even questions the sacred status of “structural reform”:

The slow recovery from the crisis of the euro zone as a whole is the result, among other factors, of (1) political resistance that delayed by many years the implementation of sufficiently aggressive monetary policies by the European Central Bank; (2) excessively tight fiscal policies, especially in countries like Germany that have some amount of “fiscal space” and thus no immediate need to tighten their belts; and (3) delays in taking the necessary steps, analogous to the banking “stress tests” in the United States in the spring of 2009, to restore confidence in the banking system. I would not, by the way, put “structural rigidities” very high on this list. Structural reforms are important for long-run growth, but cost-saving measures are less relevant when many workers are already idle; moreover, structural problems have existed in Europe for a long time and so can’t explain recent declines in performance.

Does all this sound sort of … familiar? Kind of like what other bearded Anglo-Saxon economists have been saying? As I’ve tried to point out for a long time, in this policy debate the supposedly radical types are the ones doing standard, more or less textbook economics, while the respectable voices have subscribed to fantasies ungrounded in either history or theory.

You might think that having one of history’s most celebrated central bankers weigh in on the anti-austerity side of the issue would change perceptions about what’s serious as opposed to Serious. But don’t bet on it.