No, actually he is spot on. The European crisis is layered like an onion and if you peel away the outer layers like banking, sovereign debt and all the things we hear so much about in the press, then you will arrive at the core.
That core is a inner-European trade imbalance which makes the existence of the Euro blatantly unsustainable. If you look at the overall trade balance between the EU and the rest of the world, you will see that lately, imports have been about 20 % larger than exports.
Germany on the other hand is (and has been for years) an extreme exporter. Now if you add up the numbers, you will see that obviously there must be some very heavy importers within the EU. These importers are the countries that we all know and love from the news reports and the way through which they financed their extreme trade imbalances was through massive private debt (not public debt, that's an outer layer).
Here are some numbers on the trade balances (yeah, I know, it's wikipedia. But they present both figures in a readable manner and they list the sources.):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au%C3%9Fenhandelsstatistik#Entw...
Germany was only able to reach its position as such a massive exporter by
1. Being incredibly competitive to begin with
2. Artificially boosting competitiveness by 10+ years of nonexistent wage increases, (also crippling German domestic demand)
3. Having a majority of its most important trading partners locked inside the Euro, so that they couldn't mitigate their trade imbalance through inflation (better cash in your Lira fast...), thus boosting the net worth of German exports
And that number 3 is why this crisis is never going away. Yes, never.
All "they" can do is to repair parts of the outer onion shells, buying time. However, that inner core continues to exert a force towards destabilizing the European system. Every single fix to the trade imbalance problem, probably also all partial fixes, are politically infeasible.
You cannot have a continuous flow of money from one part of the European Economy towards the other without some sort of approximately equal flow of money in the other direction. What kind of flow? If we look at the United States as a group of States that is of roughly equal size and has about the same internal inequalities between states as the EU there emerges a list of transfers that are effective in couteracting trade imbalances:
Social security,
Medicare,
Common Bank Insurance,
Military spending (wanna bet there are per capita more soldiers from Alabama than from Maryland?)
and so on.
If this is what can fix this crisis, then I am all for it. However, it seems that I am part of a minority here in Europe. So collapse it is. Ein Ende mit Schrecken oder ein Schrecken ohne Ende.