Either this is a bad faith comparison, or there is some serious financial illiteracy involved. 2008 was the year the US dollar crashed. If you take 2008 as the

Either this is a bad faith comparison, or there is some serious financial illiteracy involved. 2008 was the year the US dollar crashed. If you take 2008 as the baseline and measure things in US dollars, your conclusions will be nonsense. European economy was never as strong as the 2008 figures suggest. It was the time when the US had already been hit by the financial crisis, but nobody knew if it would hit Europe as well. You get different results if you use 2005 as the baseline. Back then, the exchange rate was pretty stable for a while. Or you could use 2002 as the baseline and get really weird results. When the euro became a real currency, it was often valued below $0.9.