When the Bill Comes Due in Europe, ‘How Are We Going to Pay for All This?’

PARIS — For nearly six months, Philippe Boreal and 120 of his fellow workers have been paid to stay home from their jobs at a Cannes luxury hotel that was forced to close for the pandemic.

Mr. Boreal, a janitor for 20 years, is grateful for the aid, which is bankrolled by the French government under a sweeping plan to rescue people and businesses from economic calamity. But as the Covid-19 crisis drags on, he wonders how long the largess can last.

“At some point you ask yourself, ‘How are we going to pay for all this?’” asked Mr. Boreal, who is collecting more than 80 percent of his paycheck, allowing him to pay essential bills and buy food for his wife and teenage daughter. Most every other hotel along the Cannes waterfront is also keeping staff on state-funded furloughs — as are countless businesses across Europe.

“The bill just seems so big,” Mr. Boreal said. “And it keeps on growing.”

For households trying to balance their budget each month, the fact that European countries are incurring trillion-euro debts is dizzying. In France alone, the national debt has topped 2.7 trillion euros ($3.2 trillion) and will soon exceed 120 percent of the economy.

But governments are far from worried about piling up debt right now, as rock-bottom interest rates empower them to spare no expense to shield their economies from the pandemic.

And spend they do.

Billions of euros are being deployed to nationalize payrolls, suppress bankruptcies and avoid mass unemployment. Trillions more are being earmarked for future stimulus to stoke a desperately needed recovery.

The European Union has upended its policies to finance the largess, breaking with decades of strict limits on deficits, and overcoming visceral German resistance to high debt.

Austerity mantras led by Germany dominated Europe during the 2010 debt crisis, when profligate spending in Greece, Italy and other southern eurozone countries pushed the currency bloc toward a breakup.

The pandemic, which has killed over 450,000 people in Europe, is seen as a different animal altogether — a threat ravaging all the world’s economies simultaneously. While German officials initially warned about runaway spending on the pandemic, European policymakers agree it would be folly to cut spending or raise taxes now to pay debts incurred to counter the economic fallout.

Those debts are surging to levels not seen since World War II. In some European countries, debt is growing so fast that it is outpacing the size of national economies.

But interest rates for many rich nations are around zero because of years of low inflation. While the amount of debt that countries have taken on has grown, the amount that governments pay to service the debt has not.

So can there be such a thing as a free lunch after all? In the current unusual zero-interest world, maybe yes.

Governments are borrowing heavily, issuing an ever growing pile of bonds. The European Central Bank is helping by buying large chunks of that…