O'Brien on ECB QE

The ECB takes out the bazooka: It’ll buy over 1 trillion euros of bonds to save Europe’s economy by Matt O'Brien

And finally, QE is a little bit of a bailout, but not in the way that Germany's afraid of. Think about it like this: When a country buys its own bonds with newly printed money, it doesn't have to pay interest on that debt anymore. Now it still does, but this is just an accounting fiction. It's moving money from your right hand to your left hand, and then back again to your right. That's because the government pays the central bank the interest that's owed on the bonds, but the central bank turns around and gives the government all the money it just got paid. 

As economist Paul De Grauwe points out, this wipes out each country's interest payments, so it's not as if Germany is bailing out everyone else. They're all bailing themselves out in equal measure. And this matters a lot for a country such as Italy, which would be running a surplus if not for all the interest it owes on its debt. Those payments, together with its still-shrinking economy, are why Italy's debt burden has actually increased despite all its austerity. QE will help this. 

But it might be too little too late. Or maybe too late too little. It's hard to tell in Europe.