The coalition of Mark Rutte has belatedly woken up to the danger. Last month it retreated from pro-cyclical tightening, delaying €4.3bn in budget austerity. By then Mr Rutte’s totemic worship of EU deficit targets had invited the ridicule of the official Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), which said Dutch leaders did not seem to understand how private credit busts interact with fiscal cuts to create havoc.