Spain's story will sound familiar to an American audience. For decades, the government promoted home ownership. As more families moved into houses in the 1990s and 2000s, home prices rose in tandem with household debt. The crunch devastated the housing stock, and nearly a third of Spanish homes now lie empty. The collapse of the real estate industry has cratered the economy, which is now growing at barely one percent a year with the highest jobless rate (above 20 percent!) in the Eurozone ... and probably the entire developed world.

But this is where the stories diverge. Whereas the United States is fortunate to have the faith of bond investors (if not the faith of the public), Spain has seen its borrowing rates creep up. In a move to please investors and the European Central Bank, Madrid adopted austerity measures at the end of 2010, which include tax hikes on the rich, 8% spending cuts, and higher taxes on some consumer items like tobacco. The effect has been to slow the economy, which in turn makes it harder to convince Spain's lenders that the country is worthy of their money. This is the vicious cycle at the heart of the European debt crisis.

It's not  clear whom the sign is addressing (the verb indicates a second-person plural subject): the banks, the Spanish government, the people, or  EU. Strictly speaking, it's hard to imagine who "owes" Spanish homeowners money, since the debt crisis originated in the private sector, whose debts the government assumed. In any case, it reinforces the global theme of the boomerang crisis in the developed world, in which governments have done a better job rescuing the big banks from the brink than restoring the wealth of the middle class.